BRITAIN’s Daily Mail has turned into the People’s Daily Mail – after the supposedly right-wing outlet published Chinese Coronavirus propaganda.
The Daily Caller revealed that the Monday-Saturday edition of the British tabloid paper that usually backs British interests was reprinting Chinese Communist Party propaganda during the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
In the investigation, it was discovered that over the last 5 years, over 3,000 articles by the British tabloid had stories which originated from the People’s Daily, the Chinese government’s propaganda newspaper, as part of a content agreement with the company which began in 2015.
This came about as the owner of the Mail Jonathan Harmsworth, boosted about this agreement and meeting up with senior officials from the Chinese government in the paper’s annual report, all the while other Mail workers called it a ‘copy-swap’ transaction with no cash involved in interviews on the matter.
This comes as various other newspapers (including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal) are under heavy criticism over allowing paid inserts from other Chinese government owned outlets (like China Daily) to be published in their work, to give the impression that they are legitimate news stories. Some Wall Street Journal reporters have been expelled recently from reporting in China, to much criticism in the West over press freedom.
During the coronavirus crisis, stories originally from the People’s Daily have been printed in the Mail, including the viral story of ‘Beijing’s leading doctor warns of a NEW coronavirus outbreak in China after the country reported its first case of someone ‘catching the illness from a person returning from abroad”, which has been shared 1.1 million times on social media, and contains comments by Dr. Li Lanjuan, a government doctor in the communist dictatorship, of which originally appeared in both the aforementioned People’s Daily and China News.
Another example includes ‘U.K. is now worst offender for sending cases to China’, of which parroted the Chinese government line about other countries sending coronavirus cases back to China (and not the other way around, of which started the whole pandemic to begin with), and also contained claims previously made by China News on this subject matter.
As of now, the coronavirus has led to allegedly 81,439 cases of it in China, with 3,300 deaths and 75,448 recoveries. In the UK, it’s led to 19,522 cases of the coronavirus, with 1,228 deaths and 135 recoveries. Worldwide meanwhile, it’s led to 710,290 cases of the virus, with 33,550 deaths and 150,734 recoveries.