China sought to cover up the sinking of its newest nuclear-powered submarine, a senior US defense official said on Thursday.
The sinking at a shipyard earlier this year was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which also said that satellite imagery later showed large floating cranes arriving to salvage it.
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The incident is a setback for China, which is seeking to modernize its navy – the largest in the world, but which includes many smaller warships such as frigates and corvettes.
That’s what gets me about this: instead of trying to claim the official was lying which is at least not out of the question, they just emphasize that the WSJ and Barron’s are Murdoch publications which seems to suggest they think the WSJ itself lied about this somehow or at least want to make that appear plausible.
Well, you can look at it as the rags in question being more inclined to receive such claims with uncritical credulity if they say something like “CCP bad,” etc. They don’t need to lie, and in fact strategically shouldn’t (though some of them countenance an alarming amount of direct lying, here I am thinking of the NYT), they can just accept what they are told by the US government, which obviously dings itself by lying but a) with the source being anonymous, how will you pin it on them without the receiving journalist destroying their career by revealing an anonymous source? and b) they’re the US government, it’s already kind of understood that they have a record of lying, but their position of power nonetheless acts as a sort of font of credibility, especially to US citizens.