Banning Tom Fowdy from CGTN over his genuine criticism of CGTN is indeed tragic. I have been very critical of the Chinese media for years for their extremely poor PR skills vs any decent media in the West, SEA, HK, Japan, and SK. This was horribly exposed during the 2019 HK riots. China lost the information war hands down. This information war defeat had serious consequences. It resulted in the terrible outcomes of the HK local elections, Tsai winning her presidential election, divided China's image among the overseas Chinese communities, and worse of all, failed to stop the tsunami of Sinophobia since 2019.
That being said. The Chinese media today is objectively better than it was in 2019. In 2019, watching how CGTN covered the HK riots was quite a sad experience. They later learned to do better with their talk shows with Liu Xin, Wang Guan, and etc. But they are still miles behind the corporate medias of the 'free-world'. They should do a lot more collaboration with other like-minded media like RT to figure out a way to improve their reporting work. If I were the Chinese govt, I would try to buy out the SCMP, perhaps keep Yonden, and some of their more sensible journalists, and then purge it of their pure anti-China shills. Make SCMP more neutral, no more hating on China, but also give enough space to argue genuine constructive criticism of China.
I hope Tom Fowdy doesn't get too discouraged by this CGTN censor. His criticism of Chinese state media is legitimate because it was a constructive criticism. He must continue to combat the anti-China disinformation campaign. Eventually, the Chinese media will learn their lessons and recognize him again.
PS. I do hope that the Chinese State Propaganda start to reign in Victor Gao. His interviews with the Australian media, and even CGTN America were disasters for China's PR campaign. I get his intentions, but his views are also quite hawkish, and he has a problem of expressing his views a bit too crudely. I would prefer a someone like Eric Li to be interviewed by the Western media. He is far more grounded and sophisticated than Victor.
