BLOOM: Chinese agitprop lights up Times Square
Xinhua buys premium ad space to propagandize naive New Yorkers
By Dan Bloom
The Washington Times
7:02 p.m., Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Propaganda comes in all sizes, and communist China wants a piece of Times Square now. Xinhua, the state-controlled propaganda agency of the Chinese Communist Party, has leased a long-term advertising logo space in Manhattan’s iconic Times Square, renting a huge LED sign called a “spectacular” in U.S. advertising parlance. According to the New York Times, the Xinhua sign is underneath a sign for Prudential and above signs for Samsung, Coca-Cola and Hyundai brands.
The problem is that Xinhua is not a brand. It is rather the mark of branded disinformation and propaganda. Americans need to know that.
Like the former USSR, today’s China thinks it can fool the Western world with glass skyscrapers, space flights and glowing Times Square signs. But the West knows better - or does it? Xinhua is merely flexing its public-relations muscles as it attempts to pull the wool over gullible eyes in America and Europe.
Xinhua isn’t a news agency. Let’s be honest: It’s the propaganda arm of a one-party state in an undemocratic land ruled by fear and paranoia that uses trumped-up prison terms to keep dissidents in line. Xinhua is akin to the old Soviet propaganda machines of yesteryear that served Russia so well in the 1970s and ‘80s. Remember Tass?
It’s one thing for Times Square to open its advertising space to private brands from across the globe, and surely Chinese brands like Haier and Lenovo are welcome to showcase their logos there. But a “news agency” that prints blatant falsehoods about events inside China and in the West, and has the unmitigated gall to call its workers “journalists”? Whoever let Xinhua into Times Square ought to have his head examined.
FULL STORY
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/9/chinese-agitprop-lights-up-times-square
This is a REAL news story, not one from People's Cube or the Onion
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