How did we reach here? This just sucks
Could you, for example, trust Western journalists to provide accurate accounts from USSR? Or believe USSR official numbers?
Then you definitely don't know how the world functions. There are allocated funds exactly with this purposes. There are the whole groups of people whose main agenda and work description is doing exactly that. But it will be often wrapped in some different wording like "responding to the propaganda" or something, even if the "response" is actual new propaganda being created and then published in the most media.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
Then consider (if you are old enough) about what the public perception of such coverage was, at the given point of time. Basically, with enough distance in time, we can easily read about the huge distortions, and just shrug and say "yes it was so" but somehow too many people assume that the present moment is somehow, by some magic, "clean."
My favorite example is the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
"a 2003 briefing document for the British prime minister Tony Blair's Labour Party government. It was issued to journalists on 3 February 2003 by Alastair Campbell, Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy, and concerned Iraq and weapons of mass destruction."
An apparent "proof" turned out to be "plagiarised from various unattributed sources including a 13-year-old thesis produced by a student at California State University."
If something that obvious (after the fact) was used as a proof for many nations to go to war, and readily repeated by all the media, what do you expect from the rest of the coverage? I personally remember the coverage from that times, it was considered "patriotic" to not even try to point to the better verified facts.
Being surprised about the fact that the direct agendas are behind most of the "news" production is just like being surprised that "there are exactly that much important news in the world per day to fit the front page of the newspaper."
Regarding "embedding" I remember reading different articles about the journalists and editors being directly enlisted by some agencies to "independently" provide "patriotic" coverage, even while operating in the mainland, not in some foreign war zones. Maybe somebody saved some such link, I haven't, and Google is not helping me.
The current state is not different, to paraphrase James Mickens, even now these players could without problem claim "we are not doing this" while at the same time wearing the t-shirts "we are totally doing this" and... only the first part will be in the titles.
Putting aside the fact that in countries with a free press it's hard to ascribe any one outlook to the media as a whole, my feeling is that most media organizations do honestly hope to inform their readers. But there is lots of information out there, and there are editorial decisions to be made around what makes the cut or how deep to dig on a story. There is no objective way to make those decisions, although presumably the interests of the readers are considered.
Of course, it's no big secret that editors and reporters are biased, or that they can be influenced. Fortunately in countries where there is freedom of speech, people have the freedom to report on that too.
The thing about China specifically is that people in other countries are hungry for information on China because it is a rising global superpower. So it makes sense that the media wants to jump on any China story they can get. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances i mentioned before, good stories on China are thin on the ground. As a result i think there is probably too much hearsay and propaganda (from whatever side) seeping into the reporting. I don't think that's deliberate on the media's behalf, i think it's more just a result of them being hobbled by a regime that is actively hostile to press freedom.
And I'm sure it is deliberate. Like I've said, not only the editors deliberately select the news, what will be covered and how it will be covered, there are agencies producing the news that the media "just covers" but having established preferences of how the coverage is supposed to be.
I was also ignorant about the phenomenon until I was directly in the location being covered. Then I've discovered that it is known that "the news are correct, except about the stuff I'm being directly involved with."
I'm just reading the front page of one local newspaper of one European country which spends almost no ink on coronavirus topic (and I know more than one president or prime minister was also doing the same until only a few days ago). Even avoiding to mention some facts is an editorial policy. In the cases of misinformation about China, repeating unproven information or even giving it any attention at all, and especially using that for titles is as a deliberate act as any other is.
There's nothing "accidental" there.
On this topic: when a city of 10 million people has been locked down for 2 months, even with no coronavirus at all they'd be backed up with 10000+ bodies, so it's not surprising to see a bunch of urns.
On a more general note, i think western media does tend to run with not particularly well-sourced China stories. That includes both stories like this one that could be interpreted negatively, but it also includes reprinting unvetted party propaganda.
The problem is that the CPC does not allow very many western journalists into China, and the ones it does allow it doesn't give the same kind of freedom of movement and freedom to report on things that we have come to expect in the west. So, as a result, the news that makes it out is often fairly flimsy and suggestive rather than heavily researched. This is deliberate - it's how the CPC can keep control of the narrative. As someone who lives here, it's extremely frustrating, because it's impossible to really know what's going on anywhere except right outside my front door.
No urns outside my front door, btw.