How China Undermines Democracy: Part 8
CBS/Paramount Studio’s girl at the White House
In November 2014, Bloomberg reporters were on the verge of breaking another huge story about the massive wealth of those at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
That’s explosive for China’s leaders, because in a still nominally Marxist country, their vast wealth has made China one of the most unequal societies in the world. With 799, China has more billionaires than anyone else. America has 626. Ninety percent of those billionaires are Communist Party members.
Business and politics are inextricably linked in communist China. Having a Party membership, and friendly ties with the Party elite gets businessmen top projects and investment in China’s hugely competitive business environment. Like the mafia — if you’re not in, you’re out. All the way out. And reciprocity is expected. The scion of party officials expect to be cut in on deals.
All the news that sells terminals …
As Bloomberg showed in 2012, relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping were estimated to have more than $370 million in assets. Beijing was furious when that story ran. And it retaliated by cutting Bloomberg TVs feed into China, slowing ts website and most importantly, reducing purchases of its financial terminals. So two years later, when it got wind of Bloomberg’s coming expose, Beijing made it clear there would be serious consequences if it ran its new story.
Even so, Bloomberg’s reporters on the story were shocked when they were taken into a series of meetings which determined the story would not run. Was it because they had the facts wrong?
No. The story was fully edited, fact checked and vetted by the lawyers.
Editor-in-Chief Matt Winkler defended the decision by likening the situation to the need for self-censorship by foreign bureaus in Nazi Germany; like Hitler’s Germany, if Bloomberg didn’t want to get kicked-out of Xi’s China, it had to pull its punches. To extend Winkler’s Nazi analogy, that’s like saying to please murderous dictators, a newsroom won’t cover events like Kristallnacht, when the Nazis torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and arrested 30,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps.
Why cover a country from inside if you can’t tell your readers what’s really going on? You’re distorting your audience’s view, not illuminating it.
Winkler’s stated reason was as dangerous as it was stupid. But on a visit to Hong Kong, Michael Bloomberg’s right hand man, let slip the real motive. Company chairman Peter Grauer said Bloomberg had “gotten carried away” with its investigative journalism in China to the detriment of its true vocation: selling those computerized terminals that provide financial information.
Bloomberg’s core business is charging financial institutions like investment banks $2,000 a month for every terminal they lease. It was once a lucrative business. From 1980 to 2008 as Wall Street grew exponentially, it made the firm’s founder Michael Bloomberg a multi-billionaire and funded his political ambitions which included his recent ill-fated Presidential run.
But since the 2008 financial crisis which saw big job losses in the financial industry that mostly did not return, China is Bloomberg’s fastest growing market for terminal sales.
Which is why Grauer said in answer to a questioner after a speech at the Asia Society in Hong Kong, “We have about 50 journalists in the market, primarily writing stories about the local business and economic environment. You’re all aware that every once in a while we wander a little bit away from that and write stories that we probably may have kind of rethought—should have rethought.”
Grauer was even more brazen during a “pep talk” in the company’s Hong Kong bureau. He said the company’s sales team had been forced to do a “heroic job” repairing the company’s relations with Chinese officials following the Xi Jinping story. He warned the Bloomberg staff that the company would “be straight back in the shit-box” in China if “we were to do anything like that again.”
All the reporters on the story were eventually terminated. In fact, Bloomberg forced the lead reporter to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and tried threatening his wife into signing another NDA. (Btw, I have deep insight into this company; every bad thing you read about Bloomberg and its founder including rampant sexual harassment and firing women who get pregnant is 100 percent true.)
Bloomberg is the most compromised news organization. But almost every major American news organization has a compromising financial stake in China that frankly makes it like profiting off the Nazis. As we showed in our last chapter, all of America’s TV newsrooms are part of media conglomerates whose most lucrative business is making movies:
CBS News is part of a parent company that includes Paramount Pictures
NBC News/MSNBC is part of Universal
CNN is part of AT&T Time Warner, which owns Warner Brothers
ABC News is owned by Disney, which owns, well, pretty much everything else coming out of Hollywood. It also owns Disneyland, which is in Shanghai.
While Fox used to be part of 20th Century Fox, in 2018 Rupert Murdoch sold his movie studio to Disney.
TV newsrooms are a loss leader for these companies. So they are happy to give Beijing compliant coverage to make sure their movies get access in China.
The people who run these newsrooms don’t have to be told the company’s editorial line on China; or anything else. They only get the job if they understand what the company wants. That’s the dirty little secret of getting promoted in any major newsroom.
That’s grotesque. Imagine tailoring your news coverage and films to please Hitler’s Nazis. But. American newspapers get paid to run Beijing’s propaganda. That’s right. Again, use the Nazi analogy and think about how grubby that makes these “journalists.”
Beijing’s English language mouthpiece China Daily has paid American newspapers almost $19 million for advertising and printing over the past four years. And that may way understate how much Beijing spent. It didn’t even file the legally required paperwork disclosing these payments until the Washington Free Beacon pressed the U.S. government for the amount.
The Justice Department records show that over the past four years, China Daily has paid the Washington Post over $4.6 million. Keep in mind, the Washington Post is the bastion of Never Trump editorial writers, who represent less than 1% of the Republican Party but 90% of all Republican media pundits. The paper also has the pompous slogan “Democracy Dies in the Darkness.”
I’m sure the Bezos Post’s China coverage is as objective as its Amazon coverage
What lies in the darkness, aside from Bezos Post stories, is that the paper is owned by the world’s richest man, Amzaon.com's Jeff Bezos. China is a vital part of Amazon’s supply chain. Trump’s decoupling from China, which is designed to help average Americans as the expense of the rich ones like Jeff Bezos, is not surprisingly vehemently opposed by his newspaper.
The Bezos Post reflects its the views of Beijing in other ways. After China marched onto Indian territory and killed 20 Indian soldiers in May, India rightfully banned most Chinese technology from its country, including 59 Chinese apps and Huawei’s involvement in the country’s 5G network. The Bezos Post’s editorial board whined New Delhi’s decision was “alarming” and “fracturing the Internet.”
Why this “curious” position?
Many former Bezos Post staff now lobby for Huawei, including its former Chief Political Correspondent Terry Neal. Given American newsrooms have alienated so much of their readership with their political bias, even ones with sugar daddies like Jeff Bezos are laying off staff. Helping lobbyists like Neal by running stories they want to plant insures you may have a job after journalism. The real slogan of the Bezos Post should be “We lie in the darkness.”
The Wall Street Journal got almost $6 million from China Daily. No surprise it also opposes Trump’s China policies and is home to the Romneyite wing of the Republican Party — losers who’ve spent 30 years undoing Ronald Reagan’s Cold War wins while they line their own pockets.
The New York Times supposedly only got just $50,000. In terms of China not reporting the truth about these payments, that amount doesn’t pass the sniff test since last week, the pompously self-described “paper of record” deleted hundreds of pro-China “advertorials” that it had run over the last decade.
In total for the past four years, China Daily spent $11,002,628 on ads in U.S. newspapers and $265,822 for advertising over Twitter.
The Justice Department filings also show that China Daily paid more than $7.6 million to newspapers and printing companies. These include The Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Houston Chronicle. Note: every one of these “news”papers endorsed Hilary Clinton.
Again, what if these “journalists” had taken Hitler’s money to run advertorials praising Nazi Germany? Unfair comparison? China runs concentration camps in Xinjiang province where it “reeducates” and likely exterminates Muslim Uighers.
Then keep in mind, over the next four months, all of these newspapers will endorse Joe Biden, a man whose family has done $5 billion in deals with the Butchers of Beijing.
The only thing more disgusting than the media’s stupidity is their hypocrisy.