Writing at The Diplomat on Wednesday, Freedom House senior adviser Sarah Cook took a sobering look at the Chinese Communist Party’s extensive use of Western public relations (PR) firms to spread propaganda – firms that are only too happy to collect hefty fees from the genocidal tyranny for helping it navigate the media landscape of the free world.
Cook built from the high-profile example of a high-powered PR firm helping the Chinese embassy place op-eds and articles in American media:
A case study on Beijing’s media influence efforts in the United States since 2019, published by Freedom House last month, highlights a contract between the Chinese embassy and Brown Lloyd James (BLJ) in which the embassy paid the firm $144,000 in the first half of 2020 to help diplomats with “crafting, editing, and placing op-eds,” as well as maintaining the embassy’s social media accounts. During those six months, then-Ambassador Cui Tiankai had articles published by the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and possibly other outlets. Since the contract ended, Cui’s successors have been much less prolific.
But filings dating back to 2011 show that BLJ also contracted with the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a proxy entity that is widely viewed as part of the CCP’s United Front work. The PR firm was paid $20,000 a month to arrange trips to China for journalism students, to enlist former U.S. government officials in writing “positive opinion articles on China” for national media outlets, to analyze “four leading United States high-school textbooks” for their portrayal of Tibet and China, and to develop recommendations for “countering the tide of public discourse” on Tibet. In the first half of 2020, the CUSEF paid BLJ more than $300,000 for services including assistance with funded trips to China for journalists from Vox, Slate, the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and the Huffington Post.
In other words, the regime in Beijing is not just paying PR firms to get its propaganda published as op-eds in major newspapers; it brings American journalists to China for training, to ensure the Chinese Communist Party’s perspective is represented in U.S. media coverage – and American school textbooks.
Another example found CUSEF shelling out $300,000 between 2019 and 2020 to develop “positive relationships with key opinion leaders in African American communities,” again including sponsored trips to China for students and university administrators.
These activities were not limited to the United States. China used PR firms to peddle Huawei networking equipment in Romania, counter bad press in Kenya for an underperforming debt-riddled railway project helmed by racist Chinese managers, and slip around Taiwan’s prohibition against paid media content from Chinese government agencies.
Cook conceded that many foreign governments hire PR firms, but China uses them on a scale no other hostile power approaches, and it cleverly uses networks of proxies to conceal Beijing’s hand.
“The individuals on the receiving end of Beijing’s outreach may be completely unaware that the Chinese government is ultimately behind a given article pitch, travel invitation, or event notice,” she noted.
China further uses PR firms to push disinformation, including “the whitewashing or denial of crimes against humanity, the deflection of legitimate national security concerns surrounding telecommunications equipment, or the propagation of conspiracy theories about Covid-19 [Wuhan coronavirus] originating in the United States.”
The latter disinformation narrative has not been heard for a while, as new revelations about the Wuhan Institute of Virology piled up this year, but for a while the Chinese government was eagerly pushing a crackpot theory that the Wuhan coronavirus was an American bio-weapon developed in a lab in Ft. Detrick, Maryland, and somehow smuggled to ground zero at Wuhan.
Concerns about China’s influence over the free world’s media have been growing ever since the coronavirus pandemic began. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) published a study in May 2021 that found China’s influence campaigns exploding in size and vigor during the first year of the pandemic, as Beijing devoted vast amounts of manpower and money to changing the narrative of a secretive authoritarian government unleashing a deadly plague upon the world.
The IFJ noted the bitter irony that pandemic travel restrictions and lockdowns pushed many foreign journalists out of China – giving the Communist government unprecedented control over coverage of itself.
“This had the effect of creating a vacuum in China coverage, creating a demand for stories from China, which could then be filled with state-sponsored content already available through content-sharing agreements,” the IFJ noted.
The IFJ report from 2021 described some of the same “media infrastructure” features examined by Cook at The Diplomat, including “training programs and sponsored trips for global journalists, content sharing agreements feeding state-sponsored messages into the global news ecosystems, memoranda of understanding with global journalism unions, and increasing ownership of publishing platforms.”
In April 2022, the Associated Press (AP) examined China’s aggressive use of social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and especially China’s own toxic platform TikTok to influence foreign media coverage.
The Chinese Communist Party saw how legacy media outlets increasingly rely on social media to generate easy content, so it went right to the source and began producing social media content reflecting China’s political interests, confident that Western newspapers and TV networks would build stories from those Instagram posts and TikTok videos.
Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow’s bestselling book Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption includes a chapter on how China manipulates American media coverage. As Marlow noted, many American news outlets belong to corporations that have “deep financial ties to China,” which gives the Chinese Communist Party a great deal of leverage to squelch coverage it dislikes.
“Why would NBC News do a big exposé on, say, Chinese concentration camps when there is a Universal Studios in Beijing? Or why would NBC make it clear to their readers and viewers that China is the worst human rights abuser on Earth when, say, the latest movie from the Fast and Furious franchise is set to open and Universal is handling the international distribution?” Marlow asked.
China’s extensive use of big-name PR firms adds another dimension to the propaganda threat, because such consultants have strong connections with news networks and publications, and they are very good at getting stories placed with Big Media outlets. In the example Cook cited, $144,000 is a small price to pay for getting articles from the Chinese ambassador placed in almost every major left-wing newspaper.
Cook had a few ideas for countering this threat, but they mostly boil down to American PR firms and media companies refusing to take Chinese Communist Party money, and there is little indication any of those companies are eager to walk away from those paychecks, or that American journalists and university staff will start turning down those all-expenses-paid trips to China.
Cook also suggested human rights activists, investigative reporters, and the victims of Chinese tyranny should fight back by financing “more sophisticated, frequent, and large-scale communications campaigns” of their own. This would be a proactive approach, but those groups will have a hard time putting together the kind of money China spends on PR, and they can’t offer overseas junkets to journalists, or threaten to scuttle the next Fast and Furious movie at the lucrative Chinese box office if NBC News runs a report they do not like.
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