World News

22057 readers

158 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.

Guidelines for submissions:

Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.

For US News, see the US News community.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Anti-China Rhetoric Is Off the Charts in Western Media (thediplomat.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

123 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

U.S. president Biden ... however stated that it was "not a major breach", and that he also believed that the Chinese leadership wasn't even aware of the balloon. ... On September 17, 2023, in an interview with CBS news, General Mark Milley, the retiring 20th US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated “I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn't transmit any intelligence back to China." Technical experts had also found that the balloon's sensors had never been activated while it was travelling over the Continental United States. The general also touched on a leading theory that the reason that it was flying over the United States, was probably because it was blown off-track, where the balloon had been heading towards Hawaii however winds at 60,000 feet simply came into the equation. Miley said, "those winds are very high.. the particular motor on that aircraft can't go against those winds at that altitude." c

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident

TLDR: Unbeknownst to China's leadership, one of their balloons blew off-track (hardly a rare occurence). It didn't collect or transmit any intelligence.

But if you watched the media coverage of that incident, you'd likely come to a different conclusion. For example:

Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence from sensitive U.S. military sites, despite U.S. efforts to block it

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/china-spy-balloon-collected-intelligence-us-military-bases-rcna77155

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

So funny how that all got memory holed and now you have people who genuinely still think it was a spy balloon of some kind (even in these very replies!) because they just never read anything past the headlines and never followed up on it after. Just completely lacking any curiosity or news literacy but will still scoff at the thought of them being victims of very obvious propaganda haha