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.
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:
https://x.com/XuZeyu_Philip/status/1367623852029661187 ↩︎
500 bucks for that last shot is laughable. Apparently I’m in the wrong industry.
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.