How the U.S. Gov’t. and Its Media Deceive Americans to Hate China

26 March 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Here is a typical example, from the largely U.S.-Government-controlled AP:

“Trump intel officials testify on threat from drug cartels as Dems press them on leak of attack plans”

AP, 25 March 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration's top intelligence officials stressed to Congress the threat they said was posed by international criminal gangs, drug cartels and human smuggling, testifying in a hearing Tuesday that unfolded against the backdrop of a security breach involving the mistaken leak of attack plans to a journalist.

The annual hearing on worldwide threats before the Senate Intelligence Committee offered a glimpse of the new administration’s reorienting of priorities. It comes when President Donald Trump has opened a new line of communication with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and has focused national security attention closer to home to counter violent crime that officials link to cross-border drug trafficking.

“Criminal groups drive much of the unrest and lawlessness in the Western Hemisphere," said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. Atop a long list of national security challenges, she cited the need to combat cartels that she said were “engaging in a wide array of illicit activity, from narcotics trafficking to money laundering to smuggling of illegal immigrants and human trafficking.”

Different parties prioritized different issues

The hearing occurred as officials across multiple presidential administrations describe an increasingly complicated blizzard of threats.

In the committee room, it unfolded in split-screen fashion: Republican senators hewed to the pre-scheduled topic by drilling down on China and the fentanyl scourge, while Democrat after Democrat offered sharp criticism over a security breach they called reckless and dangerous. …

The AP there is insinuating that the “fentanyl scourge” is a plot by China’s Government (which America’s Government actually wants to overthrow or at least weaken), but it is nothing of the sort.

The January 2020 U.S. DEA report “Fentanyl Flow to the United States” said

As Beijing and the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region (SAR) place restrictions on more precursor chemicals, Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) are diversifying their sources of supply. This is evidenced by fentanyl shipments from India allegedly destined for Mexico. On May 4, 2018, the Hong Kong SAR updated their drug law to control the fentanyl precursors 4-anilino-N-phenethyl-4- piperidine (ANPP) and N-phenethyl-4-piperidone (NPP) as well as the synthetic opioid U-47700. This matches China’s scheduling of ANPP and NPP on July 1, 2017. The move by the Hong Kong SAR is considerable, since synthetic opioids produced and shipped from China may transit the Hong Kong SAR en route to the United States. Effective May 1, 2019, China officially controlled all forms of fentanyl as a class of drugs. This fulfilled the commitment that President Xi made during the G-20 Summit. The implementation of the new measure includes investigations of known fentanyl manufacturing areas, stricter control of internet sites advertising fentanyl, stricter enforcement of shipping regulations, and the creation of special teams to investigate leads on fentanyl trafficking. These new restrictions have the potential to severely limit fentanyl production and trafficking from China. This could alter China’s position as a supplier to both the United States and Mexico.

The Brookings Institution’s expert Anda Felbab-Brown’s lengthy testimony to America’s almost solidly neoconservative Congress on 23 March 2023, “China’s role in the fentanyl crisis” was (consistent with Brookings’s being among the leading neoconservative think tanks) hostile toward China, but nonetheless admitted that:

In the case of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals, small and middle-level actors in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries also appear to be the key perpetrators of regulatory violations and source for Mexican criminal groups. In the case of fentanyl and its precursors, Chinese triads – mafia-like organized crime groups — do not dominate drug production and trafficking. …

Inducing Cooperation from China

With the Chinese government, Washington can continue to emphasize Beijing’s interests in China’s reputation as a global counternarcotics policy leader and leverage multilateral fora such the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the International Narcotics Control Board. The United States should also continue to emphasize China’s self-interest in preventing the emergence of a devasting synthetic opioid epidemic in the country as the prescription of opioids in China grows, even though Beijing has thus far been dismissive of these concerns. And Washington should continue requesting that China take down websites that sell synthetic opioids illegally to Americans or to Mexican criminal groups.

So: the AP’s insinuation that China’s Government is hostile to the United States is a lie. China is (like every nation except America’s own) in economic competition with the U.S., but it is not a hostile power as the U.S. Government and its propaganda-media deceive their public to believe, unless — and except to the extent that — the U.S. Government’s hostility toward China will necessitate its becoming so (in which case the aggressor would be the U.S. regime, and not the Chinese Government).

There have been three major credible and well-researched articles published online about the notorious CIA Operation Mockingbird, which the CIA started by its Frank Wisner under President Truman in 1948 as part of Truman’s plan for the U.S. Government to ultimately take control over the entire world — Truman was the very first neoconservative.

Carl Bernstein, who led at the Washington Post in exposing President Nixon’s Watergate scandal, managed to get his “The CIA and the Media” published on 20 October 1977 by Rolling Stone (before that too became neocon), wrote:

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. …

Other major news organizations. According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news‑gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald‑Tribune, the Saturday‑Evening Post, Scripps‑Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers Seymour K. Freidin, Hearst’s current London bureau chief and a former Herald‑Tribune editor and correspondent, has been identified as a CIA operative by Agency sources), Associated Press,9 United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. Cover arrangements with the Herald, according to CIA officials, were unusual in that they were made “on the ground by the CIA station in Miami, not from CIA headquarters.

“And that’s just a small part of the list,” in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. …

THE CIA’S USE OF JOURNALISTS CONTINUED VIRTUALLY unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency.

He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his valuable intelligence in the journalistic community. He ordered his deputies to maintain Agency ties with its best journalist contacts while severing formal relationships with many regarded as inactive, relatively unproductive or only marginally important. In reviewing Agency files to comply with Colby’s directive, officials found that many journalists had not performed useful functions for the CIA in years. Such relationships, perhaps as many as a hundred, were terminated between 1973 and 1976.

Meanwhile, important CIA operatives who had been placed on the staffs of some major newspaper and broadcast outlets were told to resign and become stringers or freelancers, thus enabling Colby to assure concerned editors that members of their staffs were not CIA employees. Colby also feared that some valuable stringer‑operatives might find their covers blown if scrutiny of the Agency’s ties with journalists continued. Some of these individuals were reassigned to jobs on so‑called proprietary publications — foreign periodicals and broadcast outlets secretly funded and staffed by the CIA. Other journalists who had signed formal contracts with the CIA — making them employees of the Agency — were released from their contracts, and asked to continue working under less formal arrangements. …

Another of these reports was by the UK’s Spartacus Educational, which said:

Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.

Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored by the press and congress. …

The third such report to be mentioned here was the tepid one from the New York Times on 26 December 1977, headlining “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.”, which simply noted that among “The C.I.A.’s Network of Correspondents” was “Associated Press.”

Although very few AP reporters, such as Robert Parry and Matt Lee, did occasionally violate the censorious norms of U.S. mainstream ‘journalism’, the rest have been — and almost 100% of the time on news regarding international relations have been — basically mere spokespersons for the U.S. Government against Governments that it wants to overthrow and replace. This is how such news-topics as China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela (and, in former years, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and dozens of other countries that the U.S. succeeded at destroying) have been so deceitful for so long in the U.S.-and-allied press as to convey to the domestic population deeply false impressions about those foreign Governments — Governments that are the targets of U.S. imperialism. And this is a major reason why the American people do not overthrow and replace the American Government: Americans have false views resulting from our lying ‘news’-media and academic ‘experts’ they hire to give credibility to their constant lies.

Journalists who won’t take it any more get pushed out. Almost all of the best ones have been.

For a successful career in mainstream journalism throughout the U.S. empire today concerning international relations, a prerequisite is to pump the neoconservative (i.e., pro-U.S.-empire) line. Typical again of this is the AP ‘news’-report that was cited and linked-to at the opening of the present article, which noted also

the U.S. government's longstanding national security concerns, including international terrorism and the threat she said was posed by countries including Russia, China, Iran, China and North Korea. China, for one, has heavily invested in stealth aircraft, hypersonic weapons and nuclear arms and is looking to outcompete the U.S. when it comes to artificial intelligence, while Russia remains a “formidable competitor” and still maintains a large nuclear arsenal.

The false insinuation there is that economic competition between nations is PURELY a zero-sum or “win-lose” game — can’t be a positive-sum game (one that improves both sides: win-win). It is, in other words, viewing all of international economics as being basically military: conquest of, and theft from, the weaker nation — exploitation and never cooperation (except in an essentially military sense, such as in NATO). That is the neoconservative viewpoint, and it is routinely insinuated throughout the U.S. empire.

Furthermore: that excerpt pretended that China isn’t being virtually forced by the American regime to “heavily invest in stealth aircraft, hypersonic weapons,” etc. — that China has NO RIGHT to protect itself from U.S. aggression.

The fundamental assumption of propaganda is that one’s public are stupid. In order for that to work, the media and the educational system must keep them that way.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.