When the press lives down to the accusations…

During the pandemic, the news outlets have embarrassed themselves with blatant fealty to China, and now a major news personality is working to clear the smeared image of that nation. When you are exposed as shills maybe the last thing you want to do is remove even more layers of objectivity? Surprisingly that message seems to have been recognized, and a planned for seminar has been canceled as a result.

Originally scheduled for this afternoon the planned web seminar was being hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists, in conjunction with Chinese tech giant Huawei. Joining Van Jones on the panel was going to be journalist Roland Martin as well as Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton — and because this was to be a serious discussion on the matter of viral outbreaks, the rapper Will i. Am from the Black Eyed Peas was also to be in attendance.

Once it was announced that Huawei was going to be involved there was vocal pushback. The tech company has long been under fire as a front for the Chinese government, and regarded as a serious threat in the form of stealing of corporate intellectual property. Before taking down all announcements the press release from Huawei on the webinar reads like Chi-Com politi-speak.

“Since the 2016 general election, Americans have faced an endless barrage of misinformation designed to undermine democratic values and sow social division among various communities. Now in the face of a global pandemic, the misinformation tide continues to rise, hitting African Americans, as well as Asian, Hispanic, rural and lower-income Americans particularly hard.”

For months now we have been contending with our national media complex working to repair the image of the Chinese communist leadership. With the global impact of the Wuhan virus pandemic, China has been concerned with its reputation regarding the outbreak, and there have been constant instances of our press corps willingly doing the PR bidding of the Chi-Coms.

From calling it ”racist’’ to use Chinese designations of the virus to praising the supposed efforts made to contain the outbreak on the mainland, our media mavens could hardly do better PR work than if they were being paid directly for image control. The reasons behind this are evident; looking into the corporate structures behind the networks explains the cheerleading taking place. As shameful as they have been in practice they seem to have zero concern with their own image as a result.

As the backlash to this scheduled event was rising the NABJ realized how it was going to be exposed and decided to cancel the seminar. Van Jones attempted to do some serious backpedaling, claiming to not know of the involvement of a controversial Chinese entity.

“I accepted invite to participate in NABJ webinar, warning black community about #COVID misinformation. I said ‘yes’ without knowing sponsor. [sic] Glad NABJ canceled; I wouldn’t have participated. I’ll keep raising alarm about pandemic’s impact on vulnerable people.”

For Jones and NABJ to claim ignorance about the participation of Huawei is hilarious. The corporation had been promoting the event, and promotional materials from NAABJ had the corporate logo prominently featured. This was not an accidental participation, there is only one way to interpret the result here — they got exposed.