Here’s a GREAT app / website: https://www.pressreader.com/catalog
I found Pressreader through the Hutt City Library who have a library-wide subscription allowing their members free access to the world’s papers.
For all those current-events interested persons who are sick of Radio New Zealand’s sycophantically-biased selection of news content, Pressreader allows readers to triangulate news content from a range of different international papers, in different languages, and through a selection of reading across multiple sources of bias, get to a better position of world events.
Press reader translates foreign language papers into the English language, enabling you to read a direct translation of what overseas papers are saying on a topic in real time. Rather than getting a AP syndicated article repeated across multiple English language papers, reading about a topic in a non-English article presents an alternative perspective woofully missing in New Zealand’s news media landscape.
Through “triangulating” across multiple perspectives on an issue readers get to assess multiple potentially differing opinions on the same topic.
COMMUNIST PARTY CENTENARY
Comments from Chairman Xi Jinping on China’s Communist Party’s centenary were reported quite differently across the international media. For example, The Washington Post editorial denounced the Chairman’s rhetoric as something western countries should sit up, take notice of and prepared for conflict. While in Singapore, The Strait Times noted that China is indeed the second most powerful country in the world. It didn’t need to do any chest beating to prove its place in the world, and instead, being a world Superpower it had obligations of leadership it needed to display.
Two very different perspectives on the same event, representing two very different interpretations of Jinping’s “Heads bashed bloody” comment.
In New Zealand, the comment generally adopted the western ‘grab your guns’ rhetoric: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/445999/ccp-100-xi-warns-china-will-not-be-oppressed-in-anniversary-speech focusing on the leader’s defiant speech as referencing western criticism over China’s human rights abuses, its crackdown in Hong Kong, and the worsening relations between the US and China over trade, espionage and the pandemic.
Undoubtedly China’s human rights abuses are worthy of international criticism. But do you approach the topic with the second largest superpower through waggling a pointy finger under a furrowed brow and stomping feet (a la The Washington Post), or look at them like neighbours over the fence respecting each others boundaries but with a sad disappointed face about how China’s created amazing technology and social change, yet in a lot of respects, they are so far behind far less developed and progressive countries (a la The Strait Times).