Even if someone distrusts literally everything that modern press is putting out, they'd still prefer to live in a world where they're legally allowed to publish blog posts talking about how bad the press is. More to the point, if someone assumes the BBC is propaganda because it's publicly funded, why would they want to live in a world where only the BBC is allowed to broadcast?

Saying that one system has faults doesn't imply that it's a good idea for us to switch to a system that is strictly worse on nearly every axis.

> how likely would a British journalist have the best interest of China at heart?

More likely than the British government.

Additionally, under a free press, anyone in Britain can publish anything criticizing the BBC, and anyone can claim that it doesn't have China's best interests at heart. Heck, even China can publish information in Britain that criticizes the BBC. Under a state-propaganda system, only state approved actors get to publish information, which means that however slight you think it is that someone would call out the BBC, a free press is still the more-likely system for that to happen. China is better off because Britain has a free press.

In regards to China itself, the idea I gather you're putting forward is that China can't counter the BBC's propaganda on its own and therefore has to protect its citizens by shielding their ears. There are a lot of problems with this idea that boil down to, 'every time a nation has tried it, it's been awful for the citizens involved.'

But a more general argument against this idea is that it doesn't scale -- it is always easier to win an argument when you control what the other person is and isn't allowed to say. If China doesn't trust its citizens to hear news from other countries, there's not going to be a point in the future where it suddenly starts trusting them. It will always be easier to make the argument that we have to protect stupid people from hearing stupid things.

An indefinite state-propaganda system is in the long run almost universally worse for the world as a whole, and almost universally worse for the citizens of individual countries. We also have a lot of examples in the past of it being worse for citizens in the short term. But the fact that there is no off-ramp for state propaganda, and no check-and-balance system to prevent it from going bad -- that would be enough to make it dangerous even if that short-term data didn't exist.

But I disagree with couple things.

First, propaganda exists everywhere, in China its carried out through censorship, in the west people do have free speech, but whose voice gets heared is controlled by a few media moguls.

And I do think there are off ramp for censorship, and if I were to guess maybe in 20 years, when china's economic development matures into a developed economy and its opinions are no longer simply waved off as propaganda but carries concrete results to back it up.

If the Western media moguls actually controlled speech to the degree people think they do, Donald Trump would not be president. I won't even deny that there are competing interests in Western media, that there are prevailing narratives that arise in certain subgroups, and even broader cultural narratives that arise across the overwhelming majority of news sources. There are lots of broad problems to address.

But it seems weird to claim that media in the US and EU are entirely controlled by a few colluding owners during one of the most politically divisive periods in recent history. If there are a few moguls controlling the message, they're doing a really crappy job of it.

> and its opinions are no longer simply waved off as propaganda but carries concrete results to back it up

In theory, I guess I agree that could happen? But if someone spends all of their time lying, and practicing lying, and seeing large benefits from lying, I don't assume they'll get more truthful over time -- I assume they'll get better at the thing they're practicing.

In regards to the wider world, the order can't be, "people will respect Chinese government opinions, and then they'll open themselves up to criticism." That's just not how respect works. People put less stock in Chinese propaganda about its economic strategies because China has a large history of lying about human rights violations and censoring critics.

People assume (not without reason) that a government that's willing to lie about protesters and ethnic groups might also be willing to lie about its economic positions and strategies. If China is waiting for other countries to respect its opinions before it opens up to internal scrutiny, then it's going to be waiting for a long time -- because the lack of internal scrutiny is the reason people don't respect them.

Are they? These times are so divided, particularly because neither side can agree on anything and the "above the fold" news coverage is farcical. Decide for yourself whether the media companies are driving divisions for page views -> clicks -> ad money, or if there's coordination in dividing us so more of our collective energy is spent caring about tweets about Greenland or to argue the semantics of the phrase concentration camp.

There are things that matter more, like anything surrounding the fact that running concentration camps is outsourced to for-profit corporations, never mind the camps themselves. How about Amazon paying anti-union astroturfers to post on Twitter, or Walmart firing everyone they can who's pro-union. How about serious issues over climate change denial at the highest levels?

The greatest trick the media moguls ever pulled, was convincing the world their propaganda isn't propaganda.

> There are things that matter more, like anything surrounding the fact that running concentration camps is outsourced to for-profit corporations[0], never mind the camps themselves. How about Amazon paying anti-union astroturfers to post on Twitter[1], or Walmart firing everyone they can who's pro-union[2]. How about serious issues over climate change denial at the highest levels?[3][4][5]

All of these examples were found by searching just one site.

The issues you mention are covered in mainstream media. You don't even need to look hard to find them. Even CBS is covering this stuff. You can argue that by percentage we're spending too much time talking about dumb stuff, and I'd agree with that. But its not hard to find reporting that's more substantial. Check out the NYT's politics section, just as an example.

So I'm not sure I understand this point of view, at all, because none of these issues are fringe debates, they're all mainstream issues that are commonly referenced in popular media. We did have large amounts of coverage about stuff like family separation, and we've continued to have major coverage of it since. Even Fox covered family separation at the border (although they obviously weren't as critical as most other news sources)[6].

If the point of the media moguls is to get us to forget that climate change is happening; again, they're doing a really bad job, given that climate change and the Green New Deal has become one of the biggest talking points of the entire Democratic party.

The difference between how the US News and Chinese news covers institutional problems and rights-abuses is a really strong argument in favor of establishing a universally free press. Free press talks about internal problems. State press does not.

[0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbjq4n/the-immigrant-crac...

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59npad/amazons-creepy-twi...

[2]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb8y9a/the-walmart-subred...

[3]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nzp7ag/louisianas-climate...

[4]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bmev9a/kentuckys-climate-...

[5]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53vd7n/maines-climate-cha...

[6]: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/what-trumps-zero-tolerance-...