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Sep 21

Written by: Diana West
Wednesday, September 21, 2022 5:06 AM 

In her recent Substack column, Naomi Wolf writes of media attacks, including by the AP. She points out:

The Associated Press is conflicted in covering this story, via its direct financial ties to Xinhua News Agency, the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua is also a ministry-level institution subordinate to the State Council of the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”), and is the highest-ranking state media organization in China.

Sounds as if the Chinese-Associated Press is conflicted in covering every other story, too. Wolf continues:

AP has a “memorandum of cooperation” (MOC) with Xinhua, which is an entity that Reporters without Borders calls “The World’s Biggest Propaganda Machine.” Members of Congress have asked AP to release documentation of the terms of this MOC. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/24/congress-demands-answers-aps-relationship-with-chinese-state-media/. As The Washington Post’s op-ed put it in 2018: “China’s state-run media companies are rapidly expanding their integration with Western news outlets, as part of Beijing’s worldwide foreign influence operations campaign. In Washington, lawmakers in both parties are calling out such arrangements and demanding U.S. media companies make sure they don’t become tools of Chinese government propaganda.” The goal of Xinhua’s and the CCP’s efforts to infiltrate Western news organizations is to suspend or weaken Western criticism of — the CCP.

Members of Congress did not get an answer regarding this cozy partnership: “I write today to assure you that AP’s business relationship with Xinhua is purely commercial in nature”, Gary Pruitt, then-President and CEO of AP, assured concerned US Senators in 2019. Oh well then...nothing to see here: https://blog.ap.org/announcements/ap-response-to-questions-about-recent-xinhua-meeting.

Gotta hand it to those Republican members of Congress: they sure can write a mean letter -- and that's it.

What should have happened next is that the AP be called upon to make a clean breast of it and register as a Chinese agent, or at least change its name to Chinese-Associated Press.

 

 

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