[20191224234044]

As a Chinese person, I've often felt that since about 3-4 years ago, NYT's coverage of almost everything China has become increasingly biased, and is increasingly targeted not at the government but at making ordinary Chinese people's lives difficult. However, very few Western people care about this, since the reports fit in with the narrative that people are already antecedently inclined to accept. When it's something one likes to hear, truth can take a back seat (especially when the domain is not one in which it pays to know the truth - there's not a hard reality you can run into). Therefore I'm very pessimistic that reports like this could make any difference. Yes, every once in a while we read sth in our own domain of expertise, and we wonder how we could justify being so trustful of everything else we read. But eventually we will all go back to our old ways, especially when (i) what we read is what we like to read, and (ii) it's not a subject on which there's any 'hard reality' to bump into.