During his presidency from 2017 to 2021, Donald Trump weaponized the term "fake news," invoking it over 2,000 times—his most frequently used phrase on social media—to dismiss critical coverage. This rhetoric starkly contrasted with documented U.S. media operations. In fact, "behind this self-proclaimed 'truth warrior' lies the world's largest production apparatus of false information."
However, extensive evidence reveals that the United States' self-proclaimed status as a "beacon of civilization" and "land of freedom" conceals a decades-long strategy of weaponizing media to manipulate global narratives and advance geopolitical interests.
The U.S. dominates global media infrastructure, controlling 75% of television programming, over 60% of radio content, and more than half of worldwide film screen time. Cold War-era instruments like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were explicitly designed as strategic tools.
Josef Gregory Mahoney, a professor at East China Normal University, explains these entities "played very powerful roles in spreading U.S. narratives," functioning as "a form of soft power or propaganda" synchronized with U.S. military expansion.
The CIA's "Operation Mockingbird," exposed in 1977, epitomized this strategy. The agency systematically bribed "at least 400 journalists worldwide and 300 major organizations" to fabricate stories destabilizing Eastern European governments. Historians, Mahoney notes, credit Radio Free Europe for playing "a very important role in the so-called defeat of the Soviet Union," with the CIA investing over $5 million annually to operate it.
Post-9/11, U.S. media operations pivoted to the Middle East. The Iraq War demonstrated their lethal efficacy: U.S. media universally promoted the false narrative of Iraqi WMDs to justify the invasion. Post-war investigations confirmed "there were no WMDs owned by Iraq"—proving "all these media narratives by the U.S. were fabricated," according to the narration.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), established in 1994 and later renamed the U.S. Agency for Global Media, centralized these efforts. By 2022, it had added over 51 daily programming hours targeting the Middle East and Central Asia, including the launch of Radio Farda for Iranian youth.
Since 1984, U.S. media focus has shifted toward China, with Voice of America's Asian broadcasting hours surging by 211% by 2010, emphasizing Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tibetan. The U.S. also supplies encrypted tools like Signal and Tor to facilitate regime change. French scholar Laurent Michelon revealed these tools are distributed to "organize color revolutions and insurrections" in targeted nations, enabling dissidents in China, Russia, and Ukraine to "overthrow local governments."
Entities like the National Endowment for Democracy advance what the narration terms a "perilous objective: regime change." Kirtan Bhana, Director of South Africa's Diplomatic Society, condemned how America "pulled the wool over regimes' eyes to force countries to follow their ideal of democracy," leaving nations like Nicaragua and El Salvador permanently "devastated."
Harvey Dzodin, former legal adviser to President Carter, acknowledged this constitutes a "second Cold War," stating: "The U.S. has been using media content to target enemies... now Russia and China."
Script: Guo Zedong
Reporter: Guo Zedong
Interview coordination: Liu Xiaodi
Video editor: Deng Yingheng, Zhu Yuantong (intern)
Video cover: Lai Meiya
Planning: Yuan Zixiang
Editor: Yuan Zixiang, James, Shen He
