So I was sent a Bloomberg piece, reprinted here by the Financial Post because the original one is paywalled.
The original title was “China Gas Buyers say Beijing Pushing Iran to Keep Hormuz Open”
Big title and of course it instantly catches attention. They since changed it to a milder one “China Calls on All Sides to Protect Ships Transiting Hormuz” which is very different as we’ll see but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, it’s common to change headline afterwards for a variety of reasons.
Here’s the crux of the article:
That’s it. Out of 576 words, only 43 (less than 10%) are important. Everything else is filler that positions China as somehow being the only buyer of oil and LNG in the world. Know who else is a big buyer of oil? Literally every country in the world.
So we get two usable statements out of this: That Foreign Minister Spokesperson said something, and that “chinese gas buyers” also “said” something.
1- On the statement - that’s normal. Everyone urges peace and resolution. Before you think that’s damning, keep in mind China so far has kept a very clear pro-Iran stance in diplomatic statements, refusing to blame them for the strikes going on and reminding that it is US and “Israeli” aggression that caused this. There’s accounts that China also provides satellite intel to Iran but ehhh I couldn’t say about that. One thing is clear just because China doesn’t send the nukes every time something happens (Posadas?) doesn’t mean they’re not doing things, it’s just not flashy.
2- on the gas buyers… like I put in the picture, which ones? where? for which companies? how did bloomberg come across the information? It may be true, but they’ll have to give me more than that to make me shut up.
Overall imperial propaganda rating? Super subtle, but it does have some signs that this isn’t a completely innocent update they published. They call China the “top polluter” later below, and push the line - by focusing solely on China - that only China is the one that wants or needs LNG and oil. Literally every African country where people use generators to supplement power outages also needs oil, I’m sure China is concerned about that too (considering all they did for the GS during covid and with BRI), but of course Bloomberg wouldn’t tell you that. Literally less than 10% of the article is for what actually happened.
Super subtle
The only part of your analysis i don’t agree with. But then i suppose it’s subjective. Otherwise very good job dissecting the piece.
It’s pretty subtle for Burgerlanders, who are really bad at sarcasm, inference, and irony. I’m certainly guilty.
I have become so hyper aware of the word count filler in articles over the years that its become difficult to even read most of this slop.
They PAYWALLED this information. Let that sink in. 43 words had value and didn’t even say what the headline said, and people are paying for the privilege of reading this!
I feel like the whole link aggregator model of social media has conditioned people into only reading headlines and also conditioned media outlets to worry most about headlines. This has always been true to some degree but in the era of the internet you can give the headline away for free and it’ll be read a million times before the body text is read at all. That’s if you can read the body text, and it isn’t just paywalled. In which case, all you get is pure propaganda.
They paywall everything nowadays it’s so bad, even stuff about their own newspaper or public interest announcements.
Predictably the article achieved what it set out to do:
I retract what I said earlier. Overall rating is 10/10, bloomberg showed us a masterful application of the theory.
It’s dire man. Some days I wish about being a liberal again just so I don’t have to share a name with these “communists”.
