For details go here: Wendy Harmer leads ABC charge on spouting China’s Covid-19 lines. It’s the ABC so you know they will lie if it doesn’t support what they want you to believe.

As anyone with half a brain knows, state-run media organisations in totalitarian societies are not the best examples of objective journalism. The English-language newspaper China Daily, which is owned by the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party, is no exception. Its purpose is not to report, but to disseminate propaganda.

Witness for example a recent televised interview it did to counter reports of state-sponsored forced labour trafficking of Uyghurs from so-called re-education camps. “They also care about us at work and teach us wholeheartedly,” said a cheerful woman purporting to be a Uyghur factory worker in Xinjiang Province. A Chinese academic assures us in the same piece that “we can find out the human rights in Xinjiang is very good”.

Heaven forbid the CCP – which has championed great human rights advances such as The Cultural Revolution, The Great Leap Forward, and The Tiananmen Square Massacre – would have it otherwise….

The China Daily segment is worth watching, if only for the comedy value of the ham actors. “So you can see she (Markson) is a social butterfly in the right-wing circle,” explains journalist Meng Zhe to co-presenter Xu-Pan Yiru, who nods knowingly. “And it infiltrates the global media in a harmful way and inspires more conspiracists to follow her steps,” Yiru says of Markson’s reporting. Between them, the word “conspiracy” is used six times in a segment just under four minutes in length.

They are not trying to convince anyone. They want their useful-idiot brigade to know what lines they are supposed to spout, which you may be sure they will dutifully do, which is what the ABC will dutifully do.