Spoiler: No.
It would seem a certain amount of foreign affairs reporting starts out as pabulum fed by the government and its loyal allies to available journos, who further if incompletely digest it and then crap it out on the digital pages of various newspapers, magazines, and think tank white papers for the delectation of a somewhat undiscriminating public.
In other words, the media is often just the messenger, and there’s no point in getting aggravated about crappy coverage and blaming the messenger when the real problem is crappy policy.
But sometimes, especially in the runup to a big foreign policy show–which the U.S. South China Sea gambit certainly has become–the evolution and devolution of media coverage provides useful insights into who’s pushing what and why.
I currently have a piece up at Asia Times, “China Hawks crosshair Obama on South China Sea” on a rather important example. It extensively fisks an interesting and rather ugly op-ed by Bloomberg View’s Josh Rogin, which seems to represent only the most recent iteration of sustained a campaign by China hawks to ensure that President Obama has no political alternative but to greenlight a yearned-for act of escalation: a US Navy Freedom of Navigation sail-by within 12 miles of one of the PRC’s reclaimed “island” features in the South China Sea.
I might add that the PRC’s views on the 12 mile limit in the SCS are rather ambiguous since it claims everything down there, water as well as land, under the Nine Dash Line formula. When the US military surveillance plane did its flyby with CNN on board in late May (which was labeled as “a challenge” even though the report makes it clear these flights go on continually and the only difference was this time a news crew was on board to publicize them), the PRC apparently accosted it on the grounds that it was approaching a “military alert zone”, not specifically because it was violating a 12-mile limit. So whether the PRC will decide to treat a close-in sailby as a unique outrage remains to be seen.
The Western media fully engaged on multiple fronts to make the case for the China threat to provide the suitable atmospherics for Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s Shangri La Dialogue appearance.
If your news or twitter feed coughs up China-related stuff, you might have seen this from Reuters on May 25: War “inevitable” unless Washington stops demanding Beijing halt building of artificial islands in S.China Sea
Reuters (and subsequently the Western media en masse) was making hay with a laboriously parsed op-ed in China’s Global Times that purported to lay out the PRC bottom line— that the PRC was totally committed to the island expansion program and there would be trouble, localized but uglier than we’ve been used to, if the United States was totally committed to stopping it—so that US planners and the global audience would be fully aware of the PRC’s position and dangerous misunderstandings and nasty clashes could be avoided.
Mission unaccomplished on the “misunderstanding” end at least, as we shall see.
The English language version of the GT op-ed stated:
For China, one bottom line is that the reclamation of these islands must be finished no matter what. If the US sets its bottom line on the condition that China must stop its construction work, then military confrontation will start sooner or later.
For understandable reasons, Reuters decided to run with the more detailed and somewhat more menacing Chinese language version:
如果美国的底线就是ä¸å›½å¿…é¡»åœå·¥ï¼Œé‚£ä¹ˆä¸ç¾Žå—æµ·ä¸€æˆ˜å°†æ— å¯é¿å…而且冲çªçš„烈度会高于人们通常ç†è§£çš„“摩擦
If the US bottom line is that China must stop construction, then a clash between US & PRC is unavoidable and the degree of severity of the conflict will be higher than what people usually understand as “friction”.
A 100% accurate, boring, and convoluted rendering of this paragraph as a headline might be PRC state-affiliated newspaper warns clashes ‘more than friction’ unavoidable if US insists PRC back down on island construction.