The tragedy of the 21st century is that the media houses of the USA are turning into the enablers of Communist China’s propaganda. The pieces of evidence have been increasing, be it the Hunter Biden emails and his links to the CCP or how the Wuhan Coronavirus was covered. The beacon of a free press which the USA was, has become compromised.
The mainstream media giants in the USA have become complicit in Chinese propaganda. These big media companies have forgone the ethics and morals of being information propagators for Chinese Yuan. The latest example of this is the New York Post‘s investigative piece on Hunter Biden’s emails which confirm his links with the Ukrainian firms and the Chinese Communist Party. The piece sheds light on how Hunter Biden compromised national security for self-profit.
The revelations were massive, but the story was buried even before it could become news. Twitter took down the post and suspended the New York Post’s Twitter account. No mainstream media, no daily newspaper carried these stories, neither the Hunter Biden Expose nor the stifling of freedom of speech by Twitter.
It brings us to the main question, how Chinese is the American media? The reality is very striking, almost all the owners and major shareholders have their stakes in one or the other Chinese company. The fact that these companies are proxies of the Chinese Communist Party and answerable to Xi Jinping is no hidden fact.
As per a report by The Federalist, these companies are now in one way or another dependent on Chinese investments to run their businesses and they are willing to go to any length to not offend their overlords in Beijing.
The report mentions that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim owns 17.4 per cent of The New York Times through the company’s Class A shares. Carlos Slim has regularly conducted business with Chinese companies which have ties to the CCP. In 2017, Slim’s Giant Motors began manufacturing cars in collaboration with China’s JAC Motors to manufacture cars for Latin America. According to a Forbes report, the goal of selling to Latin America was to circumvent the Trump administration’s trade policies aimed at protecting American jobs. This move benefited CCP in the Chinese-American trade wars. Similarly, his company America Movil has teamed up with Chinese Communist Party-run telecom giant Huawei to pitch a 5G pilot project in Colombia.
On the other hand, The Washington Post was bought by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million in 2013. Bezos has a lot of business interest in China, the Amazon Echo and Kindle e-readers are produced in Chinese factories which make sure the competitive prices and high profits for Amazon. In such circumstances, it is obvious why The Washington Post keeps silent on criticism of China.
The report also mentioned about the compromising situation of CNN. The media group is owned by WarnerMedia which has forged a partnership with a Chinese investment fund for about $50 million. The funding would directly invest in the China Media Capital, which is a media company with oversight from the CCP. No wonder CNN has been parroting Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda and praising its handling of the pandemic.
The American Broadcast Company (ABC) and China have been working hand in hand through their ventures in Walt Disney and ESPN. The Chinese government had approved the building of a Disney World Theme Park in Shanghai in 2009. The project cost was $3.6 trillion and was built with the help of Chinese state-owned enterprise. However, after the completion of the project, Walt Disney could only retain 43 per cent of the shares while the Communist Party-controlled Shanghai Shendi Group took the remaining 57 per cent. In addition to this, we have seen the ESPN take sides of CCP too. In October 2019, the NBA refused to denounce the CCP for its human rights violations to gain financial benefits and during all this ESPN and ABC stood by the NBA and Beijing. We at TFI had previously covered how Walt Disney bent its head over heels to please its Chinese overlords with movies like ‘Mulan’.
Moreover, MSNBC and NBC News are operated by NBC Universal, which has extensive financial ties to the CCP.
Even Bloomberg LP, a company owned by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has heavily invested in China. Bloomberg LP supported 364 Chinese firms directly and invested $150 billion in their bond offerings. Michael Bloomberg has also been criticised for singing praises of the Chinese Communist Party. He said, “The Communist Party wants to stay in power in China and they listen to the public,” adding “Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.”
In such situations when all the mainstream media companies and news portals have compromised their interests for Chinese money, Americans are the most vulnerable to Chinese cognitive warfare. Meaning, their decisions will not be their own but influenced by large scale Chinese propaganda machinery.