The Epoch Times, as I soon discovered, while not officially owned by the Falun Gong, as far as we can tell, has so many members of that movement on its staff that it is, some have argued, an official unofficial mouthpiece of the Falun Gong movement.
The Falun Gong movement, which some describe as a Chinese cult, mixes breathing exercises, Buddhist inspired meditation, elements of Taoism, moral philosophy, and eschatology. According to those who have studied it, the Falun Gong movement, grew throughout the 1990s and by the late 1990s had come to be seen as a threat by the China's communist leadership after members of Falun Gong held a large demonstration in Beijing in 1999 asking for recognition of the group by the government.
The Falun Gong movement wasn't peculiar to China. According to David Ownby, a professor of East Asian Studies at the Universite de Montreal, there were, by 2008, around 40,000 members of the movement outside China, including in the United States. Given the crackdown of the Falun Gong in China, the English language version of The Epoch Times has, not surprisingly since its founding in 2000, been very critical of the government of the People's Republic of China, the PRC. It also, according to sources, has connections to right wing money men who have played an important role in funding the parent body of the newspaper, the Epoch Media Group. With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016, someone who was very critical of the leadership of the PRC, the newspaper became a staunch defender of The Trumpian faith.
What was so interesting about the sample copy of The Epoch Times I received in my mailbox was its heavily apologetic and polemical quality. The sample copy I received, for example, contained an article in the "Opinion" section criticising the Black Lives Matter movement arguing, in a replay of so many moral crises in the western world, that BLM represented a threat to "western civilisation". What was so fascinating about this polemical rhetoric, other than the fact that we have heard it so many times since the early twentieth century when so many of the defenders of "western civilisation" regarded jazz as a threat to "western civilisation, was that the same "newspaper" contained several articles defending or apologising for Donald Trump and his policies.
That a journal that was quick to defend "western civilisation" from those it regarded as its critics and devoluters, simultaneously defended Donald Trump, I found both ludicrous and absurd. Trump, after all, as mountains of evidence since 2016 has shown, is someone who speaks in the dumbed down rhetoric of the schoolyard. He is the man who has made fun of many who disagreed with him. He is the man who has made fun even of the disabled. He is the man who has probably never read many if any books in his life, including the classics of western civilisation, who certainly doesn't have much of a grasp of the liberal arts, and who has probably done more than any other person to take "western civilisation" back to the seventh-grade schoolyard stone age.
So, while The Epoch Times may look like a typical America newspaper with its "News", "Life and Tradition", "Mind and Body", and "Opinion" (one of the largest sections and a section that contained much on China in my sample edition)--it kind of quacks and it kind of mimics a mainstream American newspapers--in the end it is more akin to one of those French journals from the twentieth century that wore its ideology on its sleeve. It is a newspaper that seems more like Rupert Murdoch's Fox News from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Epoch Times, in other words, is an opinion oriented journal, a journal where apologetics and polemics guides the selection of what that it covers and how it covers them. It is a "newspaper" that creates or recreates its "news" in its own politically and ideologically correct image. So, while The Epoch Times wants us to believe that it quacks--why else does it physically look like a typical American newspaper?--it really doesn't. Instead, it shills, just like all those other quacky demagogues and dogmatists of the past and in the present.
No comments:
Post a Comment