There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.
www.nytimes.com
Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security.

Western media, especially BBC and NYT, always apply gray filters to photos in China and Russia.

This article by NYT has several side-by-side photos of China versus the USA that make the gray filter especially obvious.

Notice how the plants in China are all gray, while the US plants next to oil wells are somehow green and normal:

Most obvious gray filter:

This last image of solar panels in Shanxi is hilarious. Apparently plants in China have evolved to be black instead of green:

It seems the NYT photographer in China forgot how to color grade photos, but magically remembers once they fly back to the USA.

The article itself just laments about the sorry state of US renewables compared to China, which is building solar and wind at breakneck speed.

Scroll down to see my comments documenting other cases of this visual propaganda.

  • Cenarius@lemmygrad.ml
    2·
    6 days ago

    Great thread, wanted to add Chinese military actually started applying the grey filter to some of their videos as a joke. Partly as a bookmark to remind myself to hunt down and save the ones I saw. Anyways it would be funny for it to be appropriated as Regime Filter.

  • Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.mlOP
    271·
    12 days ago

    Here’s another hilarious set of photos.

    For their article fearmongering about China leaking coronavirus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, MIT Technology Press had their photographer pick the foggiest day of the year to lie in a ditch in front of the lab to make the ditch look like a wall. Of course, the Chinese security guards were very confused:

    Another common trope is taking close-up shots of random Chinese police and security guards to make China seem oppressive and create the false impression that they sneaked into some compound.[1] This is how they get said shots:

    And here is the shot being sold:

    1. https://x.com/XuZeyu_Philip/status/1367623852029661187 ↩︎

      • Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.mlOP
        1·
        6 days ago

        You should give it a shot with Western police in DC. I’ve never seen an article on Congress be headed with a close-up shot of a security guard with the Capitol in the background, like the West always does with every NPC session.

    • shreditdude0@lemmygrad.ml
      7·
      12 days ago

      It’s crazy that they think the guy got rolled over by the tanks, but nope! A couple of people (civilians, not soldiers) came and escorted him off of the road lol 😂

  • AstroStelar [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    12 days ago

    I say it’s more because of where and when they took these photos, those do the “grey filter” already. They took them in winter in northern provinces, where the trees and shrubs become bare and heating with coal is still prevalent so there’s often a haze. Meanwhile the grassy oil silos are a stock photo by Reuters from spring 2020 in warmer Oklahoma.

    The solar field in Shanxi is in a dry, eroded landscape that has lots of exposed soil: for comparison, below is such a landscape in summer, from China Daily. Then there’s the black tarp of a construction site nextdoor on top.

    The photo in Zhengzhou is literally a field of black and white cars in an industrial park. Roofs are the only bright colours present.

    One could say: “It’s barely spring, can’t help it.” But why bother taking your own photos now if you throw in stock photos anyway? I say it’s because they wanted to give their photographer something to do and a contrarianism that goes: "China takes these photos when it shines, but it doesn’t shine all the time, eh? smuglord "

    • Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.mlOP
      161·
      12 days ago

      The issue is the weather excuse is the same one Westerners use against Russia, which also gets the gray filter treatment. Westerners have continued from the original use of the filter against the Soviets to make all their cities look bad. It seems no matter what day, BBC and NYT photographers always take pictures on the foggiest, cloudiest days imaginable in China and Russia.

      This visual propaganda serves the same purpose as the “at what cost” smear articles: to construct in the minds of Westerners an image of China/Russia/USSR as a colorless, joyless dystopia that ‘needs Western democracy’ to see color again.

      There are examples from earlier years that are much worse and more obvious.

      For instance, in a 2020 report on Wuhan, BBC deliberately applied gray and yellow filters to video from China aired to English viewers, while keeping the filters off for Chinese viewers:[1]

      In 2021, when writing a hit piece against Western Youtubers in China, the BBC applied a gray filter to a screenshot from one of the Youtuber’s (Jason Lightfoot’s) videos. This video by Brian Berletic explains exactly how they doctor said images:

      1. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1215710.shtml ↩︎

      • AstroStelar [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        12 days ago

        You’re right and I agree, I just wanted to note that the “grey filter” doesn’t have to be a literal post-processing filter like the “grey trees” were (I remember that ridiculous moment); bad-faith framing and lying by ommission are much more common than outright lying in Western media. I’m quite a pedant on these sorts of things.

  • shreditdude0@lemmygrad.ml
    13·
    12 days ago

    Bruh, the US has no room to speak. Overlooking the bluffs in Bakersfield, California looks way worse than any of this lol it’s nothing but oil rigs for miles lol

  • Rogelio_Marciano@lemmygrad.ml
    10·
    12 days ago

    Hello comrades, this thread is extra high quality. Wanted to say I’ve saved it for future reference and teaching. Got to dispel China myths.