Tag: media

China-Focused Influence Program Courted Senior US Media Figures With Sponsor-Paid Trips

A journalist’s review of Committee of 100 (C100) records has renewed scrutiny of sponsor-paid trips that brought senior figures from major U.S. news organizations to China and recorded changes in their views and professional plans.

In response to questions from The Epoch Times, C100 confirmed that it covered travel costs, selected the participants, set their itineraries, and chose whom they met.

The organization rejected journalist and media host Natalie Winters’s description of the trips as “pay-for-play,” saying no coverage was exchanged for the travel and participants retained editorial independence.

Winters published her review on Substack on July 28, characterizing the multiyear journalist delegation program as a “propaganda pipeline.” Her report drew attention to documents posted on C100’s website.

A 2012 trip report on the website marked “Internal Use” placed the cost of a nine-day delegation for five journalists at approximately $60,000.

The report said the program sought to improve perceptions of China and encourage participants to share their experiences with professional peers.

The five journalists represented The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and WNYC. A page about the delegation on the C100 website says they traveled through Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou from Nov. 25 through Dec. 3, 2012.

The trip report described lodging, meals, transportation, sightseeing, corporate and cultural visits, and about 20 arranged meetings with Chinese officials, academics, media representatives, students, and business executives.

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FCC Chair Brendan Carr Exposes ‘The View’ by Posting Video Montage of the Hosts Basically Campaigning for the Democrats

For months now, a battle has been raging between Trump’s FCC and ABC News/Disney, the owners of the daytime talk show ‘The View.’

ABC News claims that ‘The View’ is a legitimate news show, a claim that is preposterous at best, while the FCC argues that it’s not a news show.

The argument is important because the decision ultimately governs what the show is and is not allowed to do.

In a way, it’s amazing that this debate is even taking place. The View is easily the most anti-Trump and anti-Republican show on network television.

Anyone who watches the show even once knows this if they possess average intelligence.

Now, Trump’s FCC chief Brendan Carr has posted a video to Twitter/X which shows the hosts of The View basically campaigning for the Democrats.

Breitbart News reports:

Federal Communications chief Brendan Carr posted a montage video to social media of some of ABC daytime talk show The View’s most biased, left-wing chatter and electioneering for Democrats as the agency considers whether the show has broken federal equal time rules.

Carr posted the video on Thursday and wrote that, “Disney is arguing to the FCC that its ABC show The View is a ‘bona fide news program.’”

“Disney claims that its decisions are based on “newsworthiness”—rather than partisan purposes—and thus exempt from political equal time rules,” he added to the video post.

“The FCC will make its decision based on all relevant evidence and precedents,” he concluded on his July 30 X post.

The video shows various members of The View’s panel advocating exclusively for the Democrat Party and denigrating Republicans.

Still, in other comments Carr also said that he does not view the FCC as the “speech police.”

Appearing recently on The Conversation podcast, hosted by POLITICO’s Dasha Burns, Carr said that his job is to apply the laws Congress has passed.

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Liberal Justice Ketanji Jackson Mocked For Discussing the Importance of Impartiality… While Appearing on Michelle Obama’s Podcast

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared on Michelle Obama’s “IMO” podcast this week in an episode titled, “Move Through the Hard Times with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.”

Ketanji Jackson discussed her life before serving on the Supreme Court, motherhood and other topics.

At one point, Ketanji Jackson stressed the importance of impartiality.

“There are lots of limits on what judges can do, and I try to be very, very mindful and scrupulous with respect to that because, as you say, our obligation is to be unbiased in our approach,” said Jackson.

“And, so, you have to then navigate all the sources that could make for an appearance of partiality, which you want to avoid,” Jackson added.

The irony.

Michelle Obama chimed in and agreed and asked Justice Jackson if she consumes the news.

“You also have to watch your exposure to things, so that there isn’t a bias,” said Obama. “What does that mean for you in terms of reading the paper and listening to the news? And how do get your information and what do you have to be careful about? And how are you dealing with the potential conflicts so that you do stay above board?”

Ketanji Jackson said her legal team screens invitations to make sure there are no ethical conflict.

“When I get invitations to do things, I always have them screened by the legal office, the public information office, just to make sure that there are no ethical conflicts, that this is not a fundraiser, you know,” Ketanji Jackson told Michelle Obama.

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ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MS NOW ignore Fauci diary entries that reveal fixation on fame during COVID

Eye-popping diary entries written by Dr. Anthony Fauci reveal the former White House COVID advisor was fixated on his newfound celebrity at the height of the global pandemic, but anyone who relies on legacy media outlets for news and information may not be aware. 

ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, CNN and MS NOW’s on-air broadcasts ignored Fauci’s diary entries from the time they were released on Saturday afternoon through Monday at 9 a.m. ET when flagship morning shows had concluded, according to a search of transcripts using Grabien Media. 

Released by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., the journals chronicle Fauci’s day-to-day role during the COVID-19 crisis through conversations with President Donald Trump, governors and world leaders, media appearances, and his personal observations as the pandemic unfolded in 2020.

Paul, a longtime Fauci critic who frequently clashed with him over the federal response and the origins of the virus, made the diaries public as part of the committee’s ongoing oversight investigation. The diary entries document Fauci’s fondness of his newfound fame, cozy relationships with a variety of legacy media personalities, his growing frustration with the Trump White House and the suggestion that it was “not hyperbole” to say he was “the most famous and talked about person in the country.”

The diary entries exploded on social media but appear to have been ignored by mainstream news networks. 

“NBC Nightly News” failed to mention the story over the weekend and NBC continued to look the other way Monday morning on “Today,” according to Grabien transcripts. On ABC, “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning America” followed the same pattern, while “CBS’ Evening News” and “CBS Mornings” didn’t find anything newsworthy, either.  

Sunday affairs programs such as ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CBS’ “Face the Nation” also declined to cover Fauci’s diary. 

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REVEALED: Here Are the Mainstream Journalists on China’s Payroll

The identities were buried.

Foreign-agent filings reveal that operatives working for a Chinese Communist Party-linked influence organization planned free trips for American journalists based on the potential for “favorable coverage” and sought to “effectively disseminate positive messages” about Beijing.

But the filings did not plainly identify the reporters who received the access.

By cross-referencing the filings with archived newsletters, annual reports and contemporaneous accounts, this investigation has uncovered the names of prominent American journalists who participated in China trips organized or funded by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, or CUSEF.

The roster includes current and former journalists from The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, NPR, the Associated Press, Vox, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and other major American news organizations.

In several cases, the trips were followed by columns and reports defending Chinese government policies, attacking President Trump’s confrontation with Beijing or presenting the decline of American manufacturing as unavoidable.

CUSEF was founded by Tung Chee-hwa, a former vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a central component of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front system.

A bipartisan congressional report explains that the United Front seeks to “co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority” of the CCP. Its targets include foreign governments, universities, businesses, media organizations and other institutions capable of shaping public opinion.

CUSEF’s own foreign-agent records reveal how that strategy was applied to the American press.

Washington lobbyists and public-relations firms working for the organization described plans to recruit influential journalists, generate “favorable coverage” and “effectively disseminate positive messages to the media, key influencers and opinion leaders, and the general public” regarding China.

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Fauci’s diary shows he fed questions to journalists, built friendships with media figures

Dr. Anthony Fauci opened up about his relationships with various media personalities in a series of controversial diary entries that put a spotlight on the former White House COVID advisor’s cozy relationship with the press. 

Fauci’s diary entries were released on Saturday by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., detailing the doctor’s role during the COVID-19 crisis through conversations with President Donald Trump, governors, world leaders, media appearances and his personal observations as the pandemic unfolded in 2020. The stunning diary entries reveal that Fauci made fast friends with members of the liberal media who were tasked with covering the pandemic. 

Fauci’s closest media ally appeared to have been CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who was mentioned 41 times in the eyebrow-raising diary. 

According to the diary, Tapper texted Fauci to mock rival cable news hosts and other doctors. On one occasion, Tapper called to check on Fauci after an appearance on his show irked Trump supporters. 

“Jake wanted to make sure the interview did not cause me any problems,” Fauci wrote on April 13, 2020. 

In July 2020, Fauci gushed that he was forming a friendship with Tapper.   

“Had dinner over Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper’s home in DC. Terrific couple. Friendship building,” Fauci wrote, according to the diary. 

Later that month, Fauci wrote that he “gave Jake some questions to ask” pediatrician Brett Giroir during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” But Tapper would later express frustration, waking Fauci up in the process. 

“Tapper woke me up at 11:23 AM (I went to bed early) furius [sic] at POTUS for tweeting about the fact that Jake severly [sic] questioned Brett Giroir on SOTU CNN show today. Jake was really pissed at the craziness of it all,” Fauci wrote. 

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Elon Musk Just Exploded One of the Left’s Favorite Smear Tactics With Some Common Sense

Elon Musk has just dared to shine the light of truth and accuracy upon one of the left’s favorite weapons of propaganda and manipulation.

Whenever mainstream media “journalists” want to make people dislike someone and reject whatever their victim may stand for, they start calling the person they want to destroy “far right.” The idea is to associate the victim with Hitler and fascism without saying anything that could end up being legally actionable, and the leftists have not hesitated to use the label for anyone and anything they don’t like, no matter how far from anything genuinely “far right” their target may be.

One notorious example is the media’s use of “far right” to try to defame everyone who dares to oppose its favorite religion, Islam, and to speak out against jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women. And so the late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who was a gay activist with leftist positions on everything except his refusal to accept the Islamization of the Netherlands and Europe, was “far right.” So is his political heir in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, whose party’s program aligns with the left on almost everything except its opposition to mass Muslim migration into Europe, and so he, too, is “far right.”

I myself believe in free speech, free enterprise, and free society, and reject racism, fascism, and the like, but when I started writing books about how Islamic jihad is a historic and present-day threat, I, too, became “far right,” and was placed on the blacklists of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League, and defamed and deplatformed accordingly.

The whole thing has gotten so absurd that in a December 2024 article published in the aftermath of an Islamic jihad attack upon a Christmas market in Germany, the Daily Mail warned: “This Christmas market carnage will make a dangerous situation even uglier – and the Far Right will grow even stronger.” Yeah, that’s the biggest takeaway from a jihad attack that killed six people and injured over 300 others: the “far right” may take advantage.

The idea that anyone at all would have been worrying about the “far right” at that moment demonstrated how avid the establishment media is to divert attention away from Islamic jihad violence. If that required warning about a nonexistent threat and once again smearing people who were simply trying to stand against the prevailing madness, so be it.

Now, however, Elon Musk has had enough. The Hill reported Friday that in a recent interview, The Economist’s Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes claimed that Musk “supports not just the populist right, but the far right — in fact, very fringe parties in some countries.”

Musk took issue with this characterization, saying: “No, I support the normal people. What you call the far right, falsely. Literally, you could go back 10 or 15 years and these policies were completely normal.”

That was perfectly true, but Beddoes is a leftist, and so she took issue with it. She granted that “the center of gravity in this country has shifted, certainly the Democratic Party shifted to the left,” but then continued, “but that’s not what I’m talking about.” Then, says The Hill, “she said she was discussing figures such as Rupert Lowe, a member of the United Kingdom Parliament who leads the far right political party Restore Britain.”

Lowe wants to stop the mass migration into Britain that threatens to make the native people of the island into a minority in their own homeland before the end of this century. And so Musk responded: “It’s just normal people. Here are the principles, and tell me, which of these sound terrible. That we should have secure borders? That we should have safe cities? That we should have sensible spending? Which of those three are far right fringe?”

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Journalists Who Have Spent Years Comparing Trump to Hitler, Complain That His WHCD Jokes Were Mean Spirited

Members of the American media, who have spent years calling Trump an authoritarian and have even repeatedly compared him to Hitler, are now complaining that the jokes he told at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner were too mean.

Remember, these same people also regularly accuse Trump of being thin-skinned for not wanting to be compared to a fascist dictator. But they break down at the slightest pushback.

They take themselves so seriously and are completely incapable of taking any criticism while they hurl insults 24/7.

Brian Stelter of CNN writes:

President Donald Trump bombed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Friday night. He knew he was bombing, too, and he even tried to meta-joke his way out of it.

But no. Even the president’s jokes about his bad jokes fell flat, and he was widely ridiculed for the comedy routine afterward.

Members of the media mocking a leader’s dismal performance on live TV and all across the internet? In some other countries, that’s a criminal offense. But in the US, it’s the norm, so maybe Trump’s speech unwittingly underscored the theme of the dinner: America’s robust First Amendment protections.

In a rambling hour-long speech, Trump insulted journalists by name, repurposed old nicknames for political opponents, made a strange number of fat jokes that weren’t funny at all, and sounded mad at his unnamed writers for giving him weak material to work with.

The Associated Press called it an ‘insult-filled’ speech.

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CNN Host Admits He Was Wrong to Claim Illegal Immigrant Voting Never Happens, Following Discovery of Voter Fraud in New Jersey

Michael Smerconish of CNN, who is billed as a conservative commentator, said that he was wrong to dismiss the idea of illegal immigrants voting during a recent conversation with journalist Mark Halperin.

Their discussion was focused on the discovery of thousands of illegal immigrants who were registered to vote in the state of New Jersey.

It’s amazing that the New Jersey story broke just a few days after Trump gave a national address about election integrity in which he alleged that this exact thing is happening in multiple states.

FOX News reports:

CNN and SiriusXM host Michael Smerconish acknowledged Wednesday on “The Michael Smerconish Program” that he could no longer claim noncitizen voting never occurred after New Jersey disclosed that a software error improperly registered roughly 6,600 noncitizens and fewer than 400 cast ballots.

“I can’t say that any longer,” Smerconish said. “I don’t know how often it does happen, but I can’t say any longer, ‘This never happens.’”

Smerconish said he had previously reached the opposite conclusion after discussing a January New York Times analysis titled “Initial Review Finds No Widespread Illegal Voting by Migrants, Puncturing a Trump Claim.” The analysis found no evidence of widespread fraud but noted that noncitizens sometimes appeared on voter rolls…

Political analyst Mark Halperin agreed that the disclosure undercut categorical claims about noncitizen voting while cautioning that more information was needed before conclusions could be reached about its scale.

“Based on what we now know, the thing that Democrats said doesn’t happen happened,” Halperin said. “And it’s not right to take the word of the Democratic governor of New Jersey about what actually happened.”

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MSNOW Suggests Trump Will Try to Steal the 2026 Midterms – Then Completely Dismisses Massive Voter Fraud Uncovered in New Jersey

During a recent broadcast, MSNOW pushed the Democrat narrative that Trump is going to try to steal the 2026 midterms, and explained that Senate Democrats are taking the threat so seriously that they’re actually wargaming various scenarios over it.

Minutes later, the same host talks to another guest and the two of them completely dismiss the very real voter fraud that was recently uncovered in New Jersey, where it was discovered that as many as 4,000 illegal immigrants were registered to vote and that hundreds of them had voted.

This is an example of something that could only happen on MSNOW.

NewsBusters has details:

The segment opened with correspondent Ali Vitali interviewing House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on his “doomsday plans” for if Trump made a move against free elections. Vitali summarized Schumer’s concerns:

Schumer feels there is enough information to go off of from the president’s own statements, not just in recent weeks, but in recent years, casting doubt on elections that Republicans lose. To Schumer’s mind, it says that Democrats have not just an edge going into the midterms, but that they need to be able to have some reflexes to draw upon if there are attempts to sow disinformation or send federal troops to polling places. Those are just some of the fears that he has.

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