I take issue with "the lack of large scale human rights abuses."
Are you ignorant or just deliberately ignoring the genocide of the Palestinian people with an estimated 680,000 dead (~30% of Gaza) that occurred with widespread support of almost every western democracy?
China may be an authoritarian state but I would argue their large scale human rights abuses are far tamer than what these so called western democracies have been doing for the past 2 years and the direction we're headed.
It’s not propaganda, Noam Chomsky wrote a book about how media is used to advance otherwise unpopular government policies decades ago and the NYT is mentioned in it. If anything this post is propaganda.