When weighing pphysch's media recommendations, consider that they apparently believe that applying Occam's Razor leads to the conclusion that "Washington media is blowing literally any scandal out of proportion in a propaganda blitz aimed at tarnishing Beijing 2022." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29344160
Sinocism is the approximately the same level of quality as Jansen, Dumbrill, etc. That it caters to a particular crowd of liberal "China watchers", which you may be party to, does not make it higher quality.
Axios is also known for producing outright disinformation on China via zealots like Allen-Ebrahimian.
TLDR: he didn't only not get paid, he refused payment. Plus the payment offer was not "we pay you to say this" but "we want to license your content for republication" and "we pay you a fee for the trouble of appearing on our show to give your independent opinions".
Dumbshill recently posted a clip of an old video of laowhy86, “exposing” him as a racist… which turned out to be taken extremely out of context and edited to be purposely misleading.
Hard to form an informative opinion when he released that AFTER he got exposed. It's possible that video is just him trying to save his skin. Just saying.
In addition there was a marked change in tone from when they were in China.
I subscribed and enjoyed that content and the two Exploring documentaries. Really good content.
When they left China it started to sound like highly personalized hate speech. I initially assumed that it was because they were upset at having their livelihoods up-ended and a sense of rejection. But... initially they had great plans for wide-ranging travel documentaries which did not seem to pan out ... so it seems like the next-best thing is Five Minutes Hate against our enemies in East Asia.
Sad to see them degenerate, but not living there now they are not much of a source of information.