More Propaganda in the West

In case you missed my first installment of "Propaganda in the West", here is a link:
http://odracirys.blogspot.com/2014/06/propaganda-in-west.html

If you read that, you will notice that I'm not saying that the West has the most propaganda. Far from it. However, it does exist and I often notice it. Therefore, I like to call it out once in a while.

This installment focuses on the article, "Pentagon cites 'dangerous' Chinese jet intercept".
(http://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-cites-dangerous-chinese-jet-intercept-165354051--politics.html)

This was a news story about China, and even before I read it, I knew that it was going to be an American overreaction to something either trivial, or something that would have been called a Chinese provocation if the tables were turned. The US media loves making China into the bad guy, no matter what the truth of the matter is. Sometimes, China is the bad guy and deserves the criticism it gets. However, that does not excuse those who criticize China over nothing. Unfortunately, those stories seem to be more common.

Let's look at the beginning of the article and put the provocative statements into more objective words.

"The Obama administration on Friday accused a Chinese fighter jet of conducting a 'dangerous intercept' of a U.S. Navy surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft off the coast of China in international airspace — the fourth such incident since March."

OK, China certainly sounds like the bad guy, but what objectively happened in this situation? Well, a Chinese fighter jet intercepted (not shot down, just intercepted) a US Navy spy plane (that's what "surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft" means) off the coast of China. "International airspace" is airspace over a country and its territorial waters. According to Wikipedia, territorial waters extend "at most 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) from the baseline (usually the mean low-water mark) of a coastal state."

In other words, a US spy plane was flying perhaps as close as 23 kilometers from the coast of China. Maybe it was more, but my guess is that it was gathering data, so it probably wasn't very far away. The first thing that pops into my mind is "what if the roles were reversed". If a Chinese spy plane were collecting data just off the coast of the United States, what would happen then? Probably an intercept. I don't know how "dangerous" it would be (the article said that the Chinese jet "did a 'barrel roll' maneuver over the top of the Poseidon at one point and also passed across the nose of the Navy plane, exposing the belly of the fighter in a way apparently designed to show that it was armed").

It's funny that many people commenting on the article said, "We should have shot that Chinese jet down!" (I don't know how a spy plane would shoot down a fighter jet, but anyway, that was their thought.) Yet if a Chinese spy plane ever came near the US coast (while staying in international waters), I'm quite sure that they would give the same response - "We should have shot that Chinese jet down!" However, they can't conceive of how the Chinese might feel in either of those situations.

I try to be objective in everything that I do, but lots of people out there (all around the world) aren't, and they can find whatever news they like to feed them what they want to believe.

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