cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47629216
Chinese state media outlet China.com has published a report about a Tesla Model Y that lost all power on a highway despite showing 72 km of remaining range, and the story has gone viral across Chinese social media. The incident is drawing attention not just for the failure itself, but for the fact that state-controlled media chose to amplify it, a potential signal of shifting government sentiment toward Tesla in China.
…
It’s certainly hard to make an inference from a single incident. What we can say is that anything critical of China is rigorously censored in mainland China, while non-Chinese incidents are conveyed with a critical spin. The goal is to portray China - or, rather, its government - as superior.
This is certainly also the case in many US and Western media such as FoxNews in the US as you say. I fully agree that many here in the West have an agenda. Unlike China, however, we in the West have a broad spectrum of media outlets with many of them being independent. For example, we can find many articles critical of Donald Trump in various US media despite his administration’s current move toward autocracy, but you can’t find even a single piece in Chinese media that is critical of Xi Jinping.