“Every one of [the stories] was a propaganda piece paid for by the Chinese Communist Party,” Tucker Carlson told his audience this week, “all designed to look like news articles.”
Carlson was referring to “advertorials,” which are newspaper ads designed to look like a newspaper story to catch the reader’s eye. In the name of journalism ethics, an advertorial typically states somewhere that an advertiser paid for it but it appears the country’s most famous newspaper failed to include that important footnote over several years.
The Washington Free beacon, which reported on the now-deleted stories in an August 4 story, quoted a Times spokeswoman who said the newspaper had stopped accepting “ads from state-run media” at the beginning of the year.
The propaganda newspaper is China Daily, which is overseen by the CCP, and prominent newspapers including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Houston Chronicle, and The Chicago Tribune have published China Daily stories, and deposited the CCP checks, over the years, the Free Beacon reported.
A spokesman for The Washington Post told the Free Beacon the newspaper had not published any China Daily advertorials since 2019.
Back on his show, Carlson said $20 million has flowed from the Chinese Community Party to prominent daily newspapers across the country since 2016.
“Every one of them,” Carlson said of the newspapers, “was a propaganda piece paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, all designed to look like news articles.”