Commentary

On Thanksgiving day, President Donald Trump held a press conference, and the media relentlessly pressured him with questions about whether he would leave the White House, in effect repeatedly calling on him to concede. The scene reminded me of the Cultural Revolution in China and how the media attacked Liu Shaoqi.

Li Shaoqi, the president of China between 1959-1968, was attacked by the media day and night after the communist leader decided to get rid of him. Within a few days, he was removed. Abused, he died alone, without even his family being informed. At the crematorium, he was an anonymous body—the workers did not know this was the former president. Parades celebrating his downfall were held nationwide.

When I was growing up in China, the communist state-run media were the only voice we were exposed to. We were told only the Communist Party can take care of people. Only socialism is the right path for human life, and the only way to provide us with a happy life.

As I grew older, after I immigrated to America and lived a different life, read more and travelled more, I started to understand the communist media is like poison. It poisons minds and plagues society.

The communist media is not meant to inform. It is a machine the communists created to lie. It is made to hide the truth and to use lies to control the people. It is not meant for small lies. It is a lie machine that systematically leads the entire society to believe in its lies.

By pushing a theory, a narrative, an ideology that is against human nature, against human tradition, and against our cultural heritage, it can brainwash the entire country to such an extent that there is no standard of right and wrong. It actually sets up the opposite standard: evil is right, and good is wrong.

The communist media are not meant to foster mutual understanding. They sow division and create hatred. The communists destroy human society by driving people into opposite groups, creating hatred and leading people to fight.

Because of communist propaganda, peasants killed landlords, workers killed business owners, within each small group, people also killed each other. This is why in the Soviet Union, Russians killed Russians, and in Communist China, Chinese have killed Chinese. Under communism, 80 million Chinese have been killed, more than the total number of deaths in the two world wars combined.

Communist propaganda can be hard to spot because it disguises its evil intentions with political correctness. The communists claim to be “serving people,” achieving “equality,” and “helping the poor.”

It sounds like idealism, which is why it has been effective in attracting young people. Before communism took over China, it named itself the “savior” of the people. Once it took power, the Communist leaders got busy fighting for power among themselves and enjoyed the best life. The rich became poor, and the poor became poorer.

Here in the United States we can see our media acting like the media in communist countries.

CNN and the New York Times dress themselves in good intentions by telling us we have a serious problem with racism, just as the communist media claim to be serving the people. In fact, by pushing this narrative of racism, the media are fomenting division. It is no accident that this summer we saw young people rioting and burning in our big cities. They have been trained to hate, just as in China, the communists trained people to hate.

But in China the tool used was class struggle. “Racism” in the United States is for our mainstream media what class struggle was in China.

In reporting on America in the world, the mainstream media portray the United States as evil and say it should feel guilty for its power and prosperity. This is similar to how the media in communist countries call on the rich to confess their sins.

The mainstream media have told us America is in decline, which is exactly what the  propaganda of the Soviet Union said and what the CCP media have been saying. Those communist media have never stopped calling on America, the free world’s leader, to concede.

On Thanksgiving we saw the media pressuring Trump to concede. In fact, the mainstream media have never accepted Trump as legitimate.

For instance, according to the Media Research Center, in the months March through May 2020, coverage of Trump by ABC, CBS, and NBC was 94 percent negative, with the coverage reaching an unprecedented 99.5 percent negative in May. Since Trump was elected, MRC has regularly found network coverage that was 90 percent or more negative.

This unanimity of perspective is what one expects out of communist media. It is a propagandistic attack.

As with the political correctness employed by communists, behind this unanimity is a conviction that Trump and conservatives simply have no right to their opinions.

Hundreds and thousands of people have come forward to expose fraud in the 2020 election, but the media have not reported what they have to say. This is a deliberate control—or censorship—of people’s voices.

The non-stop attacks on Trump, the political correctness, the silencing of viewpoints–these are all the hallmarks of communist-style press.

America has been the envy of the world for its freedom and prosperity, and American media have been considered the exemplar of a free press. Media in other countries follow American media and trust them. Do we still have independent free media? If America falls, the whole free world falls. Who will win? America or the communists?

Diana Zhang, Ph.D., is a staff writer with 20 years’ experience in the study of China. Based in the United States, she uses a pen name to protect her family members in China.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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