Media And Corporate Elites Act As PR Machine For Chinese Communist Party

The Chinese Communist Party is in an all-out propaganda war to deny its hand in unleashing a plague upon the world, and American corporations and media elites are helping.

Madeline Osburn reporting for The Federalist

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is in an all-out propaganda war to deny its hand in the plague they unleashed on the world, and American corporations and media elites are wholly accepting its unverified information.

Goodwill is central to the statecraft of the people’s Republic of China, which is why their response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak is two-fold. First, they suppressed information, threatened doctors, and allowed the new virus to spread rapidly in its infancy. Destroying evidence of what happened under their roof is crucial to maintaining their status on the world stage. Second, the CCP is not only looking to shift the blame away from itself, but painting China as the world’s humanitarians by sending doctors and supplies to Italy and other countries suffering from their own deathly decisions.

“They tried to suppress this information…instead of trying to actually do the work to suppress the virus, which is what the world demanded,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News.

Deathly decisions are not new or foreign to the CCP. It’s estimated that the Chinese Communist Party is directly responsible for the death of more humans than is any other organization in human history. The number of lies told by the CCP are impossible to know, much less count. Despite their attempt to suppress all truth, we know about Tiananmen Square, the organ harvesting, the mismanaged SARS outbreaks, and the more recently discovered “re-education” camps of the country’s ethnic minorities.

Despite this well-known history of deception, the mainstream media has cheerfully regurgitated Thursday’s “reports” from China that their country has no new locally transmitted cases of the Wuhan coronavirus. A CNN report from Hong Kong blared the headline “No New Local Infections.”

The Guardian ran two stories, one calling China’s lockdown “brutal but effective,” and another reporting “no new domestic transmissions of Covid-19.” The same from NPR, Forbes, NBC, ABC, Vox, and The New York Times. Each and everyone of these story’s only source for this claim? China’s National Health Commission.

A key part of the CCP’s virus cover-up has included expelling American and foreign journalists from the country, under the guise of ceasing the spread of “rumors.” Squashing “rumors” was also its reasoning for censoring and jailing doctors and officials in Wuhan who attempted to raise alarm at the beginning of the outbreak. Why would Western outlets, whose journalists have been barred from reporting in China and with no way to verify, feel confident in reporting that the number of China’s new cases did not gradually taper off, but just suddenly ceased to exist?

Other fables spun by China have landed in American news reports as well. A New York Times story titled “Its Coronavirus Cases Dwindling, China Turns Focus Outward” depicts China as a thoughtful and gracious world peacekeeper. It features more unverified data about China’s cases, and touts China’s donations of masks and other supplies to Italy, only to then bury the fact that those supplies were sold, not donated, as a “critique” at the bottom of the story.

In segments on Thursday, this same story of Chinese humanitarian goodness played out in segments on both CNN, which said China is leading the world while Trump abandoned it, and on NBC, which claimed China “helped” the world by “delaying” the spread of coronavirus.

Perhaps the worst, or best from China’s perspective, purveyor of CCP talking points is The Atlantic, which has published a slew of articles claiming calling the “Wuhan virus” by its name is “xenophobic.”

Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said that although the story of Wuhan coronavirus may be new territory, we are not in new territory on the nature of the actors involved in this story.

“We know the track record of the Chinese Communist Party. We know they lie, we know they falsify medical data. That’s been proven in scientific medical journals,” Smith said. “I do not think we have any evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is operating in good faith at this time. We have a ton of evidence that they lie, and every piece of data coming out of China right now should be verified independently.”

Either our media are completely ignorant of the CCP’s motive, or they have an ulterior motive. And if this week’s White House briefing circuses and sustained story line over the racist linguistics of “Chinese virus” are any indication, it seems to be the latter. While Americans fear for their lives and their livelihoods, politicizing President Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic remains the media’s top priority, even if it means reporting unverified Chinese talking points.

But the media is certainty not alone, and maybe not even the worst, at protecting the CCP’s story, because they don’t get paid for it. Big corporations and organizations like Google, the National Basketball Association, Marriott, Apple, and major Hollywood production studios are notorious for bending the knee to China’s demands. There is, of course, a lot of money to be made there.

On Thursday, the president and CEO of Mariott International, Arne Sorenson, released a video to address how Mariott is responding to the spread of the virus. Sorenson repeated the same talking point, the “good news” that China has succeeded in reducing the spread of the virus, “through strong counteractions.”

In 2018, Mariott fired an employee who “liked” a tweet by the Friends of Tibet Twitter account, a group that supports Tibet’s independence. In fact, here are 14 times major brands and corporations censored themselves or apologized to appease the CCP.

“Within these corporations there is a certain team, or certain set of individuals who are responsible for maintaining the relationship with China,” Smith said. “And on the Chinese side, that always is under the control of and includes individuals that are a part of Chinese State Security.”

It’s more than likely the same corporate individuals at companies like Marriott, who tell the CEO all new cases of the Wuhan virus in China have ceased, are the same individuals being leaned on by their Chinese counterparts to silence Americans for liking tweets about Tibet. Operators of the Chinese Communist Party may not be experts at rapid response, but they are extremely good at maintaining process and pressure points.

All of China’s doubling down — the conspiracy theories, the claims of racism, the booting of journalists, the humanitarian facade — is a deflection from their totalitarian systems that inevitably led to this global pandemic. They know that their standing in the world is in the toilet.

Our media and our corporate elite should know better than to fall for well-established totalitarian tricks. They should not be so easily fooled, so easily tempted by anti-Trump sentiment, or so easily tempted to trade good business for the sake of Communist China’s geopolitical problems.