Given how often both Trump and the media lie, Americans don’t know what to believe. So when Trump made an accusation about China and U.S. journalists in his prime-time address, I heard from listeners and readers asking what’s true. In the new episode, I break it down. Listen anywhere.
In his remarks, Trump read from a newly released CIA document, which says China sought “journalists” to write negative stories about him.
It does not say China succeeded. Some analysts note that Trump’s allegations include raw, unverified intelligence. Beijing, of course, denies the claims. Also, “journalists” in this context could refer to influencers, sometimes called “citizen journalists.”
Still, much of the media has carried water for Beijing. I interviewed Salih Hudayar, a global leader of the Uyghurs, the people of East Turkestan. “The Chinese government spends billions of dollars annually buying ads from many of these major media organizations,” he said. “They’ll be like, ‘In exchange for that, you’re not going to write anything critical, especially on this issue. You’re not going to even touch this issue.’ That’s why you don’t hear about our issue anymore.”
Journalism’s ‘Church-State Separation’
As Freedom House explained in 2022, China ran paid advertorials in major U.S. news agencies, including Time, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, USA, CNN, and Foreign Policy. Filings showed “that from January 2019 to October 2021, China Daily paid print and online publications at least $7 million to carry such material.” As the news about this was coming to light, some of those agencies stopped the advertorials.
Did the ads automatically swing news coverage to be pro-China? Not automatically, no. News agencies are supposed to keep business and editorial sides apart. Some call it the industry’s “church-state separation.” But in reality, the former all too frequently bleeds into the latter. Keenly aware of ad revenue, (bad) journalists decide to cover or not cover something. There’s often no paper trail proving it.-
Freedom House said Beijing also used cyber attacks on news outlets; cyberbullying of journalists; retaliations against families of U.S.-based journalists in China.; and verbal or trolling attacks on ethnic Chinese journalists working for U.S. media, especially women. “These activities have inhibited certain reporting and had a notable economic impact on US news outlets, though they continue to carry critical coverage.”
It’s unclear how much of that is still underway now. It’s possible that China, like Iran and Qatar, already brainwashed so many young people that it no longer needs to push as hard. Some of these radicalized folks now work for news agencies where they carry out Beijing’s preferred agenda.
You can see that in New York City. Major news outlets failed to even point out that Mayor Zohran Mamdani took part in a celebration with Chinese officials — representatives of an actually colonial, genocidal empire — while abusing his office to push the world’s most insane lies against Israel.
JL
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