“Wherever the readers are, wherever the viewers are, that is where propaganda reports must extend their tentacles.” — Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, February 2016
You may watch their nightly newscasts. Or you read their stories online. In their pages, they claim to publish all the news that’s fit to print. They warn democracy dies in the darkness. Or they fashion themselves as the most trusted name in news. Yet, what they are telling you about China does not square with the facts. To the reader it may look like Chinese propaganda. That’s because it often is.
The reason most major American news outlets tilt heavily toward China is simple. They are co-opted. Compromised. Conflicted. They are in the tank. In some cases, they are literally on the Chinese government payroll. They’ve sold their news souls for a few yuan.
Using the immense government resources at its disposal, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to influence global news consumers fall in line with Xi Jinping’s 2016 directive. And it pays off. The level of success is astonishing.
The CCP does this in a variety of ways. It goes beyond merely denying visas to foreign journalists who do not toe the Beijing line (here, here). Although withholding visas has proven to be very effective. After they’ve had visas denied for daring to publish unflattering stories, news organizations come around to China’s preferred approach to reporting. The firm control over visas has ensured nearly universally favorable coverage from U.S. reporters based in China.
Even media outlets that do not have a presence in China, and are not reliant on Chinese visas, favor China in their coverage. A strategy the Chinese government has employed in guaranteeing news stories adhere to the CCP’s approved narrative is using the influence of Chinese government-owned and government-aligned entities. According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “China uses what it calls ‘United Front’ work to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
An off-shoot of the United Front is the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a registered foreign agent under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. The CUSEF has been showering American journalists with lavish meals and trips to the Communist nation. The CUSEF’s activities have been likened by many to a propaganda operation. A leaked CCP document states “media should be infused with the spirit of the Party.”
News outlets that have been recipients of this largesse, with very few rarely disclosing these ties in their reporting, include the Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times, and Washington Post, just to name a few. Newsweek, National Journal, Congressional Quarterly, and Foreign Policy are among the nearly three-dozen news organizations known to have that benefitted from free trips to China. The CUSEF efforts have yielded tremendous success. The foundation’s U.S. lobbying firm reported in 2011 that in the previous year it successfully placed in U.S. newspapers about 3 articles per week that were favorable to China.
The CUSEF has also funded several U.S. universities and academics, sometimes surreptitiously, and prominent foreign policy think tanks including Brookings, Center for American Progress and the Atlantic Council. These think tanks not only influence Washington, DC decision-makers but, are also mistakenly cited as impartial, informed experts by news outlets.
China’s efforts to influence U.S. academia do not stop at the college-level. The CCP’s Confucius Institute has funded classroom study at more than 500 K-12 programs throughout the U.S.
Not to be overlooked are the dozens of current and former federal, state, and local elected officials that have taken free visits to China. Their writings and public statements are intended to influence and provide political cover for current lawmakers.
China Daily is the government-owned mouthpiece that’s been designated by the U.S. State Department as a “foreign mission” of the Chinese government because it is “beholden to the Chinese Communist Party” [emphasis in the original in State Department report]. China Daily has been prolific in writing checks for millions of dollars to financially challenged U.S. newspapers for “printing services” and to place in the various papers its “China Watch” supplement. That supplement has been described as “designed to look like real news articles,” likely misleading readers into believing it is original reporting from the actual newspaper, and not realizing it is actually Chinese government propaganda.
In the most recent 12-month period ending October 31, 2021, China Daily paid (here, here) nearly $5.75 million to several periodicals with cash-strapped Time magazine receiving $1.4 million of the total. In the 42-month period between November 1, 2016 and April 30, 2020, China Daily paid more than $4.3 million to the Washington Post and at least $5.7 million to the Wall Street Journal. These lucrative cash receipts likely encourage the newspapers to play along with the deception.
The Chinese Global Television Network (CGTN) is another Chinese media outlet that has been designated as a “foreign mission” by the U.S. State Department. CGTN has a channel carried to tens of millions of American households on the Comcast and AT&T cable systems, and to the U.S. House and Senate offices.
CGTN has paid millions of dollars to U.S. radio stations to broadcast Chinese propaganda. One station in Washington, DC received more than $4.3 million in the two-year period ending August 2021 to carry “materials prepared by CGTN,” according to Justice Department filings.
The coronavirus pandemic offers a snapshot at just how successful Chinese government efforts have been in influencing news coverage. It is well-documented China obstructed efforts to uncover details of the origin of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. Yet, months into the global China-originated pandemic, China’s global image actually improved, according to a survey of journalists in more than 50 nations by the International Federation of Journalists.
The Chinese government has benefited from a well-orchestrated influence campaign throughout the western press, including in the U.S. For example, countless American media outlets scoffed at the all-but-certain virus origin in the Wuhan Institute of Virology as “theories [that] were relegated to the right-wing fringe.” One media outlet parroted the CCP narrative that dismisses the notion there was “some level of shady or incompetent behavior by Chinese scientists” that resulted in an accidental lab-leak. The Chinese can do no wrong, they want the public to believe. CNN also found the Chinese narrative helpful in that cable channel’s strategy to bludgeon then-President Donald Trump.
It’s not just the free junkets and the wining and dining of American journalists that has led to Chinese success. Most major media organizations with news outlets have overwhelming conflicts of interest due to investments in China that are reliant on being in the good graces of the CCP.
NBCUniversal is the parent company of a wide swath of television channels including news outlets in the U.S., Europe and Latin America including NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CNBC World, Sky News, Telemundo and Universo. It has major ownership stakes in web sites Vox and BuzzFeed. Vox owns New York magazine, vox.com, The Verge, and Now This News (acquired in the 2021 purchase of Group Nine Media). In late 2020, BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost from Verizon.
NBC and MSNBC have a news share relationship with the Xinhua news agency. Like China Daily, Xinhua has been designated by the U.S. State Department a “foreign mission under the Foreign Missions Act” that is “beholden to the Chinese Communist Party” [emphasis in the original]. Yet, NBC and MSNBC promote Chinese government propaganda as news.
NBCUniversal has a more than $6.5 billion investment in China that would be lost if the CCP blocked its operation. NBCUniversal partnered with Chinese state-owned companies to build the very ambitiousUniversal Beijing Resort theme park that opened just months ago. NBCUniversal holds a 30% stake in the venture that is forecast to generate more than $1.6 billion in annual revenue.
In 2011, NBCUniversal paid $4.38 billion for the U.S. broadcast rights to the 2014-2022 Olympics, and another $7.75 billion to extend its broadcast rights to the games through 2032. Although U.S. viewer ratings for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were dismal, the games generated $1.76 billion in revenue for NBCUniversal making them the most profitable games ever for the company. The 2022 Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing. (NBC also broadcast the 2008 games from China.) NBC would not dare to diverge from the CCP-approved narrative and jeopardize its billions in investment and its anticipated payday.
The parent company of NBCUniversal is the Comcast Corporation. It operates the nation’s largest cable systems. Most Comcast set-top boxes are manufactured by Arris International in Chinese plants. Being beholden to Chinese manufacturers for critical equipment needs places additional leverage on Comcast, and down the line to its news operations.
During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, a press release from China’s New York consulate praised Chinese ties with the Comcast Corporation and declared what it expects from NBC News coverage, “We hope that the NBC and other U.S. media will objectively and fairly report China's efforts to control the epidemic.” It apparently worked. Just days later in March 2020, an incredulous NBC News story claimed the coronavirus had nearly been eliminated in China and that new cases in China “had all arrived from overseas.”
The Washington Post is one of the most influential newspapers in America, particularly for the inside-the-Beltway crowd in the nation’s capital of elected officials and government bureaucrats. The CCP wants access to the Washington Post for the very same reason why the paper was purchased in 2013 by Jeff Bezos: manipulate the national news narrative. The paper’s private owner was not just the wealthiest man on the planet when he bought the Washington Post Company. He is also the founder of giant online retailer Amazon.
Chinese pressure on the Washington Post includes more than just the millions of dollars the Post has received for adding China Daily supplements to the newspaper. About four in 10 (approximately 600,000) of the 1.5 million active vendors that sell their products on Amazon are Chinese owned. The Chinese share of Amazon vendors has more than doubled from just 16% in 2016. Reportedly, 45% of Amazon’s top sellers are Chinese companies. A Chinese government order to ban these vendors would prove catastrophic to Amazon. And it would pose a huge financial blow to Bezos whose immense personal wealth is derived from Amazon’s stock value.
China is the second largest consumer market, after the United States, and Amazon is battling with Chinese online retailer Alibaba for market share. Amazon can ill-afford to have the Washington Post stray from the expected narrative and put Amazon’s China sales in jeopardy.
There are other ties between Amazon and China. Amazon’s highly successful Echo and Kindle electronics are produced at the Foxconn plant in China’s Hengyang province. This is the same plant where primary assembly of Apple’s iPhones takes place. China is not only the manufacturing hub for Kindle devices but, it is also the world’s largest market for Kindle. Foxconn has a reputation for brutal labor conditions, and the employment of children. One high-level American visitor reported Foxconn had a problem with suicidal workers jumping to their deaths from the plant rooftop.
What preoccupies Amazon’s attention is the potential fortune to be made by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The cloud services system heavily promoted by Amazon, AWS is the fastest growing business unit for Amazon, enjoying revenue growth of more than 30% annually. The Communist nation with nearly one billion Internet users (about 1 in 5 users globally) makes China the largest internet user base in the world. Combined with China’s nearly 140 million businesses, it’s easy to understand Amazon’s strategy is to cash-in by dominating China's cloud services. Currently, AWS is the second largest, and growing, provider of cloud services for Chinese companies globally.
Not all cloud services in China serve the common good. The CCP is using cloud services in its immense population surveillance network, including integration of facial recognition software, to monitor and track Uyghurs and other disfavored minorities in the Xinjiang province. According to one report, “image data that once took a month to process could be evaluated in less than a second.”
Every business deal Amazon has in China is contingent on keeping the CCP happy. Examples of Amazon’s meeting CCP demands included the disabling of customer ratings and reviews of a book featuring the writings of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and labeling as “best seller” another book featuring Xi despite a sales ranking of greater than 1,000,000.
When asked, Amazon handed over to Chinese officials the IP address of a Chinese dissident living abroad making it possible to determine the dissident’s physical location. (This doesn’t say much for the Post’s“Democracy Dies in Darkness” schtick.) Amazon also launched a portal in China titled “China Books” that features books laden with CCP propaganda. Topping the list of pay-backs is the Washington Post’s sycophantic coverage of China.
Like Amazon, Apple is heavily reliant on China for manufacturing and sales. Primary assembly of the iPhone takes place in the notorious Foxconn factory. After the U.S., China is the iPhone’s second biggest market, and it is growing. The iPhone is the top-selling smart phone in a nation of more than 1.6 billion mobile phone users. In addition to the iPhone, Apple has enjoyed record revenue in China due to robust Mac and iPad sales and revenue from services such as its App Store and Apple Music.
Apple News is a congregator of selected news sources. It is unlikely a news story on the plight of the Uyghurs will ever be featured in an Apple News feed. The Apple News application is preloaded on all Apple devices. Notably, Apple media ties involve more than just Apple News. Apple shareholder and founder Steve Job’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, holds majority stakes in The Atlantic and Axios, popular outlets with left-of-center readers.
The nation’s most influential newspaper is the New York Times. The paper has collaborated with the Chinese government’s China Daily by adding its “China Watch” supplements to the Times. The New York Times offered a spirited defense of China Daily, following the State Department’s designation of it as a propaganda outlet writing, “China’s media efforts in the United States have tended to reflect more traditional forms of government propaganda. Reports on CGTN [China Global Television Network] or in China Daily, for example, are more likely to extol the country’s economic and diplomatic achievements than to denigrate American democracy.”
The Times further defended the China Watch supplements as “generally offer[ing] an informative, if anodyne, view of world affairs refracted through the lens of the Communist Party.” It is stunning any U.S. news organization would praise Chinese propaganda.
In 2020, the New York Times published a very lengthy attack on the Falun Gong that reads as if it was drafted by the CCP. The Times dismissed Falun Gong’s highlighting of well-documented reports of Chinese government persecution of its citizenry as “exaggeration.” Taiwan, Uyghurs and Falun Gong are the three most hated entities by Chinese Communist leaders.
While western nations were reporting tens or even hundreds of thousands of coronavirus-related deaths as of late 2021, the New York Times repeated China’s absurd claim the Asian nation suffered “fewer than 5,000 deaths since the pandemic began.” The Times credited “China’s ‘zero Covid’ policy, which has served the country remarkably well.”
But the biggest driver influencing the Times coverage of China may be one the paper’s biggest stock owners. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, named by Forbes as the world’s 16th wealthiest person, is the largest outside shareholder of New York Times Company stock. He acquired 14% of the paper’s stock in late 2008 thereby rescuing the New York Times when the paper was in a dire financial crisis.
Slim made his vast fortune in telecommunications. His portfolio is dominated by America Movil, a telecommunications company that is the largest mobile phone services provider throughout Latin America. Slim also owned Tracfone, a leading prepaid wireless service in the U.S., until he sold it to Verizon last year. Nearly all of his equipment is manufactured in China. In addition, Slim has launched several businesses in cooperation with Chinese entities including telecommunications and auto manufacturing ventures, particularly throughout South and Central America where China has been increasing its economic and political influence, and “securing access to raw materials (such as oil, ores, and minerals).”
Bloomberg Media Group’s parent company, Bloomberg, L.P., leases thousands of Bloomberg terminals to Chinese companies. Using proprietary hardware and software systems, the Bloomberg terminal allows users to access real-time market data, enact investment trades via several platforms, and conduct investment analytics. The company’s 325,000 terminals worldwide generate about $8 billion in revenue annually for Bloomberg.
The company also operates a Chinese language financial news service through its Bloomberg Professional Services. Bloomberg’s Davos-style conferences in China represent a growing revenue stream for the company, and they provide a western platform for Chinese government propaganda.
Bloomberg Media Group includes the Bloomberg News brand, a cable news channel, radio stations in New York, Washington, DC, Boston, and San Francisco, syndicated news services, and Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
The fact is China has a loyal soldier in Bloomberg, L.P. It’s founder, Michael Bloomberg, has been a staunch defender of Chinese leader Xi Jinping going so far as arguing of the autocratic strongman, “Xi Jinping is not a dictator.” Bloomberg has also endorsed China’s harsh policies toward Hong Kong.
Bloomberg News threatened ruinous legal action against a woman who reported death threats against her family over an article, critical of China, her husband was writing for Bloomberg News. Bloomberg spiked her husband’s and other stories deemed unflattering to China and its leaders.
In recorded comments, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler, in referring to an unflattering investigation of Chinese elites, notoriously said, “It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country. So, I just don't see that as a story that is justified."
Another major media corporation in the China theme park business is Disney, the parent company of ABC News. Theme park Shanghai Disney cost the mouse house $5.5 billion to get up and operating. It launched in 2016. In return, Disney has been all-in on promoting CCP propaganda. In an in-your-face action toward the brutalized Uyghur population, Disney filmed its 2019 live-action film, Mulan, in the Xinjiang province where the bulk of Uyghurs and other disfavored minorities live.
Disney also owns National Geographic in a joint venture with NG Society, and has a major ownership stake in Vice Media, which lists James Murdoch, the youngest son of Rupert Murdoch, among its longtime investors.
In 2021, Disney’s new streaming service in Hong Kong scrubbed from its play list an episode of The Simpsons cartoon that mocked Chinese censorship and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Disney’s ESPN sports channel has climbed aboard the CCP bandwagon by annotating on a map the independent nation of Taiwan as part of the Communist mainland. China has long claimed Taiwan is a renegade province. A key CCP strategy has been to isolate Taiwan, a democratic nation that is considered among the freest in all of Asia. Today, only 13 nations and the Vatican extend diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. The U.S. is not among them.
CBS owns CBS Interactive, the largest foreign-owned interactive media company in China with locations throughout the Asian nation. CBSi China accounts for ten percent of CBS Interactive’s revenue. According to published reports, CBS censors content from television programs broadcast in China that are deemed offensive including mentions of children’s character Winnie-the-Pooh because the cartoon caricature is used by Chinese citizens to mock Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Even Facebook is riding the China gravy train. At about $5 billion per year, Chinese-purchased ads comprise the second largest market after the U.S. Yet, Facebook is banned in China. If China is not reaching the Chinese people with its Facebook advertising, then who is the intended audience? The U.S., of course.
Warner Media, parent company of CNN, has invested in Chinese entertainment companies for the past two decades. In 2015, Warner Media partnered with the state-owned China Media Capital, to launch Flagship Entertainment Group, a film production company with CMC holding a 51% ownership stake. The majority control of Flagship Entertainment Group gives CMC the control to produce films that only promote favorable Chinese cultural narratives, i.e., propaganda.
When the partnership was initially announced, China was already the world’s largest pay TV market of more than 223 million subscriber households with nearly $18 billion in revenue forecast by 2017. Streaming revenue across the Asia-Pacific region (much of it in China) is anticipated to reach $50 billion by 2024. Some of the content that will be provided to the entertainment partnership will come another joint effort between WarnerMedia subsidiary Turner and China’s Tencent.
WarnerMedia’s CNN joined the ranks of American media outlets that parroted Chinese propaganda. In the early months of the pandemic when western militaries reported coronavirus infections among their ranks, CNN published a report, citing Chinese state-owned media, that “not a single serving member of the [China’s] military has been infected.”
There are other media companies that have China investments that necessitate CCP approval to operate. The privately-held Hearst Corporation is the largest U.S. publisher of magazines worldwide. The company boasts of 600,000 readers of its Chinese language magazines including Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Good Housekeeping, among others. Cosmopolitan is one of the most popular magazines in China. In addition to its China-based publishing portfolio, Hearst Media China offers “multi-media business innovation services via advertising campaign, digital marketing service, video production, CRM solutions and nationwide retail distribution management.”
Hearst’s China operations would be at risk if its media outlets in the U.S. and China did not hew to a CCP-favored narrative. Hearst publishes more than 75 daily and weekly newspapers in the U.S. including the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The company co-owns with Disney the ESPN stable of cable channels and the A&E Networks. It also operates more than two-dozen TV and radio stations serving markets such as Boston, New Orleans, and Tampa.
Hearst has been kind to the communist nation. The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board blasted suggestions the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology as “reckless” insisting the lab leak theory “rests on a host of such unfounded and circumstantial claims.” The paper further criticized, “[b]aseless accusations of Chinese culpability for the virus.” This editorial position undoubtedly has kept Hearst in good stead with the CCP.
Roll Call is a Washington, DC newspaper and online website that reports on activity on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in the nation’s capital. Its sister publication is CQ (formerly Congressional Quarterly), that also reports on Congressional and other political activity in Washington, DC. Roll Call was acquired by FiscalNote in 2018. FiscalNote was founded in 2013 by Tim Hwang, Gerald Yao, and Jonathan Chen with investment provided by Chinese firm Renren, among others. The stated mission of FiscalNote is to predict legislators’ votes.
Former New York Times columnist, Ben Smith, by way of BuzzFeed, was instrumental in the 2022 launch of Semafor. Ben Smith partnered with Justin Smith who was previously the CEO of Bloomberg Media, which has its own conflicted relationship with the Chinese government. Similar to websites Axios and Vox, Semafor attempts to “explain” the news rather than report it. It has extensive financial ties to the Chinese government. In early 2023, Semafor launched a propaganda platform titled “China and Global Business.” The platform is a product of the Center for China and Globalization, which is directed by the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party. The mission of the UFWD is to discredit political opposition.
Advance Publications owns more than two-dozen magazines including The New Yorker, Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, and GQ, to name a few. It also owns Reddit, Advance Local, American City Business Journals(business newspapers in 44 major cities), and it has sizable ownership stakes in Charter cable and Discovery Communications. Reddit is a news aggregation and discussion website that is among the top 10 most visited websites in America, and has long promoted itself as free speech forum. Chinese company Tencent is a co-investor in Reddit. In 2017, Tencent snapped up a major financial stake in Snap, the parent company of popular messaging app SnapChat, one of the top 10 most popular apps in the U.S. In what may be a sign of things to come, Tencent owns China’s heavily censored top messaging app, WeChat.
In contrast to news and media outlets that follow the CCP script, Yahoo announced it is pulling out of China, rather than comply with harsh Chinese government demands.
(Updated March 24, 2023 to add Semafor to the column.)
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, Post, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).