U.S. Media is in China's Pockets

The leading American media outlets, both in print and on TV, continue to cover for China and its role in the development of the coronavirus. Why is that? What connection do U.S. media companies have with China? Well, perhaps, the relationship runs deep.

Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson opened his show reporting that hundreds of articles on the New York Times website from last summer suddenly vanished. The Times didn't randomly select articles to erase from its archives. Thanks to readers who preserved the articles when they were in print, we have learned that each missing story includes propaganda designed to look like a news article and was paid for by the Chinese Communist Party.

Notably, the Times archive, which dates back to 1851, no longer carries an article headlined "China Watch: Diaoyu Islands Belong to China."

"Why would the New York Times, America's paper of record, print propaganda from a totalitarian regime and pretend it was a news article?" Carlson asks. 

You guessed it. Money. A lot of money. As Carlson notes, financial filings show the Times made more than $100,000 a month from the Chinese government.

Media outlets are like middle school students -- they just want to fit in. They follow the leader. According to Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post followed the lead of the New York Times and accepted millions of dollars from the Chinese government in exchange for printing pro-China propaganda. 

"Since 2016, the Chinese government has paid $20 million to outlets like the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post," Carlson says.

Twitter, whose "editors" have even less credibility than those at the Times, also got involved in the deal, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese government. If you were wondering why Twitter allows the Chinese government to tweet propaganda about how it treats Muslim women in its concentration camps, you now have your answer.

Those CCP tweets remain on Twitter, but the NYT has deliberately erased much of its content from last year. So what's changed? Why has the Times suddenly hidden and erased the propaganda pieces it published last summer? Is China no longer sending them money? The Times won't say. When Fox News asked them about the deleted articles, the Times said they do "not discuss revenue beyond what is our quarterly earnings reports."

Translation: it's none of your business. That goes for you too, Times subscribers.

What we do know is that the financial windfall from China influenced the Times not to investigate the origins of COVID-19: "The biggest factor was that the New York Times was taking money from the Communist Chinese government. So they killed a story — which by the way, was not a conspiracy theory at all, but entirely real," Carlson states.

Two Times staffers confirmed as much to The Spectator on Monday. The Spectator also reports that China was a crucial factor in the Times business model before the pandemic. TheTimes received millions of dollars from Chinese government-controlled outlets, particularly China Daily, before COVID hit.

"So as this virus emerged from central China to kill Americans in huge numbers, and people throughout the west, news organizations in this country made the same aggressively pro-China noises," Carlson goes on.

We now have to wonder what role China played in the TV news coverage of the pandemic. From the start, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News dismissed the possibility that China may have developed the virus.

And they are still doing China's bidding to this day. On Monday, each of those TV networks ignored a bombshell report from House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans, which makes a compelling case that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab. CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News mentioned the finding a combined zero times.

There's a lot we still don't know about the relationship between China and American corporate media. And based on how the Times operates, we may never know. But the outlet's ties to China at least explain why the paper has protected China since the start of the pandemic. The mainstream media doesn't care whether China, their generous business partner, played a role in developing the virus. Random users on message boards have demonstrated more curiosity about the origins of the virus than paid media reporters.

The U.S. media has always been dishonest, but a totalitarian regime has now compromised it as well. Following Tucker Carlson and The Spectator's reports, whatever credibility the news industry had on Monday, which wasn't much, has been considerably reduced today.