NYT, WaPo Publishing Chinese Propaganda for Cash Ben Marquis

NYT, WaPo  Publishing Chinese Propaganda for Cash
Ben Marquis

It can seem at times like the establishment media has an underlying bias against the ideals of American exceptionalism and independent dominance on the world stage, and now a potential reason for that may have been discovered.

An investigative review has revealed that several major media outlets have been, for quite some time, running paid advertisements disguised as regular news articles that are nothing more than propaganda put forward by the Chinese Communist Party, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

That pro-China propaganda is paid for and promulgated by a communist state-run media outlet known as China Daily and its paid-for ads, both online and in print, appear in American establishment media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

It is legal for foreign entities and governments to pay for advertising in the United States, provided it is fully disclosed as such. The problem here is that it doesn’t appear that necessary disclosure was occurring.

Based upon an expert review of the ads and federal filings, it appears that China Daily may have run afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act on a routine basis by failing to adequately and fully disclose the paid advertising it had purchased in the American newspapers.

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China Daily formally filed as a foreign agent in 1983, according to the Free Beacon, but declined to disclose to the Justice Department any advertising relationship with U.S. media outlets until 2012. Even then it continued to fail to fully comply with FARA by not providing a full breakdown of its spending activities and by withholding copies of paid advertisements, among other potential violations.

As per a review conducted by the Free Beacon and FARA experts of China Daily’s ads — both physical copies submitted to the DOJ as well as online copies that weren’t submitted — the Chinese propaganda pusher is believed to have purchased and run more than 700 online ads and more than 500 print ads in the major U.S. media outlets since 2012.

All of those propaganda pieces, which are cleverly disguised to appear as normal news or commentary articles, tend to frame China and the communist government in the most positive light possible while downplaying the things that China is often criticized over — such as its oppression of Tibet, the imprisoning of Muslim minorities in concentration camps in Xinjiang and the brutal crackdown on pro-freedom protesters in Hong Kong, among other things.

According to graph charts prepared by the Free Beacon, it appears the vast majority of the online ads by China Daily appeared on The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times’ websites, while a solid majority of the print ads appeared in the pages of The Washington Post and, to a lesser extent, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and British outlet Financial Times.

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The fact that the U.S. media outlets have been running these propaganda ads on behalf of China’s communist government hasn’t sat well with Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, a Republican member of the House Armed Service Committee and longtime critic of China Daily. He essentially accused the American outlets of selling out their credibility for ad revenue.

“These outlets claim to support democracy, but they’ve participated in a cover-up for an ongoing communist-run genocide,” Banks told the Free Beacon. “It’s disgusting.”

China Daily declined to provide comment for the Free Beacon’s report. Spokespeople for the three major U.S. media outlets did provide various comments in defense of the practice, but all three declined to specify how much revenue had been gained by the ads sold for propaganda articles.

However, one advertising firm that has published ads in all three outlets, and requested anonymity so as not to disrupt current deals with the three, told the Free Beacon that full-page ads typically cost between $65,000 to $120,000 apiece, suggesting there are millions of dollars in revenue that are at play.

That would coincide with what financial details could be gleaned from China Daily’s FARA disclosures, which while not specific, did show that the media outlet had been infused with $11.8 million from the Chinese government over just the past year alone.

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Odds are, these U.S. media outlets running Chinese government propaganda are not unwitting dupes and while the outlets may claim that selling the ad space for propaganda has no impact on how they report when it comes to stories about China, that is just as difficult to believe.

The Western Journal has reached out to all four named outlets — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times — for comment but has not yet received a response. We will update this article if and when we do.