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March 27, 2024 - Epoch Times
22:15
The New York Times' Dirty Communist Secret
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About two weeks ago, our team here at the Epoch Times flew down to Panama in order to cover what's happening over at the Darien Gap and to expose the UN's involvement in the ongoing migrant crisis.
How the UN is, quite literally, bankrolling migrants to make their way up through Central and South America and, ultimately, enter the U.S.
At this very moment, where we have millions of migrants coming here illegally across the U.S.
southern border, well, I frankly cannot think of a more important story to cover.
However, the New York Times, they did find a more important story.
That's because, while our team was down there in Panama covering the migrants, videotaping them, taking photos of them, and interviewing them, the New York Times, they sent a reporter to photograph us.
I kid you not.
While we were there reporting on the migrants, the New York Times had someone following us around, from place to place, photographing us, and ultimately, they published a story, this one here, about how right-wing influencers descended on the Darien Gap in order to chase cliques.
If you've ever wanted a more stark contrast between the Epoch Times and the New York Times, well, these two stories are quite literally perfect.
One story exposing the UN's weaponization of mass migration, and another story criticizing the people who are exposing the problem.
However, this example is only the tip of the iceberg, because looking beneath the surface, the level to which the New York Times promotes communism, and seemingly acquiesces to communist regimes, is nothing short of breathtaking.
For instance, over on their website, the New York Times maintains this special section right here, called Red Century, which explores the legacy of communism.
But it's not the legacy of communism that you're probably thinking of.
It's not the mass murder, death camps, brainwashing, forced sterilization, and things like that.
It's not that.
Instead, the New York Times has filled this special section with articles like these.
How to Parent Like a Bolshevik, How Mao Molded Communism to Create a New China, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, The Love Lives of Bolsheviks, as well as The Little Red Book for Children, Trying to Imagine a Future Without the Horrors of the Past.
There are more than three dozen articles like these in that special section.
If you'd like to go through them for some reason, I'll throw a link down into the description box below.
Furthermore, the New York Times' ideation of communism is not limited to that one little subsection on their website.
Instead, it appears that this pro-communist ideology just generally permeates the entirety of the newspaper.
For instance, here's a recent New York Times article published out of Africa.
And in it, they positively profile communist agitators, and I mean real members of the Communist Party of Swaziland who are trying to overthrow the king and the government of Eswatini.
The framing of that article, as well as the beautiful photographs that they use, well, they really leave an impression on the reader that these actual communists are a good alternative for the nation.
By the way, this is not a new phenomenon at the New York Times.
Back when the USSR was still being ruled by Joseph Stalin, the New York Times literally won a Pulitzer Prize for their articles debunking the idea that Ukrainians were quite literally being starved to death.
Quote, The New York Times has a sordid history of amplifying communist propaganda.
In the 1930s, its star Russia reporter, Walter Duranty, infamously covered up the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine and even collected a Pulitzer Prize for it.
In private conversations, Duranty affirmed he was aware of the famine.
For instance, Duranty told a U.S.
State Department official in Berlin that, in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities, his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own.
Decades later, the paper commissioned a consultant to determine whether the Pulitzer should be returned.
The consultant concluded that it should be returned, but the paper refused to do so.
And according to a phenomenal book called The Grey Lady Winked, this pro-communist reporting, it continued throughout the early pivotal years of the Soviet Union.
Quote, "The paper published blatantly pro-communist propaganda as news reports during the early critical years of the rise of the Soviet Union, and continued to do so well into the Soviet years.
The New York Times regularly carried news reports and analyses written by communist agents and Soviet sympathizers.
If the Times leadership felt the pro-Soviet reporting was inaccurate or misleading, they certainly never did anything about it.
And the New York Times' adoration of communists was not limited to Soviets alone.
For instance, when Fidel Castro was just on the cusp of clinching power over in Cuba, quote: The New York Times helped to prop up his image too, calling him democratic.
The paper's publisher even met with Castro at the time.
The communist dictator was welcomed to the New York Times headquarters again in 1995, flanked by favorable coverage of his U.S.
visit, and yet again in the year 2000.
A former editor of the New York Times, Mr. Tom Kuntz, was concerned at seeing Castro enjoying an ecstatic welcome at the offices, with crowds of staffers following the dictator around.
In an interview with the Epoch Times, he said, it was like Michael Jackson or Elvis had come into the building.
And, of course, no discussion about communist cover-ups can be complete without a mention of communist China.
Quote, Mao Zedong, whose dictates caused the deaths of an estimated 80 million people, was once hailed by the New York Times as a democratic agrarian reformer.
In 1973, the New York Times published an op-ed which read, The social experiment in China, under Chairman Mao's leadership, is one of the most important and successful in human history.
And just for your general reference, by the year 1973 when this op-ed was published, the Great Leap Forward had already killed something like 30 to 40 million people over in China, and yet Mao's experiments were framed as the most successful and important in human history.
Furthermore, there's a phenomenal book called Buried by the Times, which exposes how during the 1930s and 40s, the New York Times chose to downplay the reporting on the Holocaust.
According to the research in that particular book, during all of World War II, the story of the Holocaust, which included a massive amount of first-hand information that was being made public, it made the front page only 26 times out of 24,000 front page stories.
And out of those 26 times, only 6 of them had Jews identified as the primary victims.
But here's the worst thing about all of this.
At the New York Times, seemingly, not much has changed in the last 50 or 60 years.
In fact, according to this new report, which just dropped four days ago, it's now the Chinese Communist persecution of Falun Gong practitioners that the New York Times has not only been ignoring, but in a certain sense, helping since the year 2001.
Quote.
Not only are the victims' plights typically treated with silence and indifference, but even more damaging, when they are reported, articles are riddled with misrepresentations, inaccuracies, and outright hostility, displaying a shocking degree of unprofessionalism and bias.
The impact of the Times' distorted reporting and irresponsible treatment of Falun Gong practitioners as unworthy victims has contributed to the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators and robbed their victims of the vital international support undoubtedly resulting in greater suffering and loss of life throughout mainland China.
Now, in case you've never heard of it before, Falun Gong is a spiritual meditation discipline that gained a lot of popularity in China throughout the 1990s.
As a practice, it combines an adherence to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance with physical meditative exercises.
And in China, during the 90s, it became widely popular, with upwards of 70 to even 100 million people practicing it.
You would see parks and stadiums filled with people practicing Falun Gong across the whole country.
However, you might remember if you're old enough, that in 1999, a man named Jiang Zemin was the president of China at the same time that Bill Clinton was the president of America.
And Jiang Zemin was, by most metrics, a brutal dictator.
He came into power by backing the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and then also, in order to cement his grip on power at the turn of the century, he was the one who personally initiated the persecution against Falun Gong practitioners in mainland China.
He personally ordered the crackdown, which has resulted in the brutal persecution against Falun Gong practitioners over the past two decades.
His edict was threefold, to defame Falun Gong practitioners' reputations, to destroy them financially, as well as to destroy them physically.
And to that end, an entire state apparatus was set up to facilitate the persecution.
He filled the ranks of the domestic police force with his own political appointees, and he made persecuting Falun Gong practitioners the way by which people would get promotions.
And even though it's really hard to know the truth, because, well, among other things, the Chinese Communist Party is very secretive about these sorts of things, but I've seen estimates that as much as 25% of the nation's GDP was being poured into the persecution of Falun Gong in one way or another around the time of 2000-2001.
By the way, I'll mention that this persecution never ended.
To this very day, people in China are still getting arrested, tortured, jailed, and even worse.
In fact, on this very program, we interviewed an architect here in New York by the name of Simon Zhang, whose mother was arrested over in China right ahead of the Olympics because she was handing out anti-persecution flyers.
And sadly, just as an update to that interview, shortly after we spoke with him, his mother was found dead in a Chinese prison.
And so, with all this happening as the background, you would assume that the most influential paper in the world, the New York Times, with all of its vast resources, would rush to expose this atrocity.
But you would be wrong, because according to this report, aside from a handful of articles during the first few years of the persecution, well, the New York Times, they have not only been conspicuously silent on this particular issue, but also, in the rare instance that they do cover the persecution of Falun Gong, they do so by echoing the talking point of the Chinese Communist Party.
According to this report, since the persecution began in the year 1999, only 159 articles have been written about Falun Gong, most of which were published in the first two years.
And in fact, when you look at it in graphical form, as the number of official deaths increased, the number of articles significantly decreased.
And furthermore, not only did the number of articles shrink to almost nothing, but also the tone of the articles that the New York Times did publish changed significantly after the year 2001.
Quote, New York Times coverage of Falun Gong, with two possible exceptions, lacked on-the-ground investigation, relying almost entirely on statements from Chinese government sources or highly visible protests to drive its news coverage, which was dominated by inaccurate and negative portrayals of Falun Gong teachings.
That when reporting on a group that's being persecuted by the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, the New York Times was relying on the CCP for their information.
Which, on the face of it, is obviously odd.
Because during that same period of time, you had other mainstream legacy news outlets, like the Wall Street Journal and even the Washington Post, doing original, on-the-ground reporting, exposing the persecution.
In fact, during the early years of the persecution, the Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for a ten-article series exposing the imprisonment and torture of Falun Gong practitioners.
But the New York Times did no such thing.
They covered other issues, like things related to Tibet and the Uyghurs, but after 2001, there was a notable dearth of any real reporting on this particular issue.
And so you might ask yourself, why?
What happened at the New York Times in the year 2001?
Why did they go from publishing some articles about the persecution to publishing hardly any articles, with the only ones they would publish containing the framing and talking points of the Chinese Communist Party?
Well, the answer to that appears to actually be rather simple.
In August of 2001, President Jiang Zemin of China gave a private interview, alongside a private meeting, to the leadership of the New York Times, which included the paper's publisher at the time, Mr. Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
According to the report, quote, The goal of the meeting was to explore the possibility of a Chinese-language version of the Times and perhaps other business interests.
The delegation also raised concerns about the New York Times' website being blocked in China.
Days after the meeting, NewYorkTimes.com was unblocked and remained accessible to mainland readers for the next 10 years.
Thus, as the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post were producing Pulitzer Prize winning and groundbreaking journalism, the crowning achievement of the New York Times during that same time period was advancing the Times' business interests in China while offering reporting on Falun Gong riddled with inaccurate and negative characterizations.
This ominous beginning set the stage for the next 20-plus years of problematic journalism, as the Times ventured further down the path of vilifying Falun Gong beliefs and teachings while ignoring gross and well-documented human rights abuses against adherents of the spiritual practice.
And so, isn't that amazing?
Shortly after this 2001 meeting with the president of China, the New York Times website magically becomes one of the only news websites to be unblocked in China.
And by sheer coincidence, their coverage of the persecution evaporated.
Before 2001, within the pages of the New York Times, Falun Gong was described as a peaceful spiritual practice with roots in traditional Chinese culture who were victims of a communist propaganda campaign.
But after 2001, Falun Gong practitioners began to be described as a sect that Chinese communists may or may not be persecuting.
Quote, Most early New York Times coverage of the CCP's campaign against Falun Gong in China, as typified by a July 28, 1999 editorial, denounced the ban of the practice with words such as persecution, political campaign, crackdown, violent, harsh, and propaganda.
By contrast, later coverage, after 2001, framed the persecution as a more even-handed battle or public relations war, as if there was a level playing field between the largest communist regime in the world and a group of peaceful meditators, or worse, as if what was at stake was merely public image and not widespread imprisonment, torture, and killing of innocents.
Falun Gong's concerns of ongoing rights abuses were increasingly cast as part of a PR campaign by the group with the merit of the claims neither considered nor investigated with any depth.
Now, on the surface of it, this might not seem to be that important.
How some particular newspaper frames some particular story seems to be getting a little bit into the weeds.
However, here's the thing, though.
If this was some fringe publication, it wouldn't really matter.
I mean, here in America, there are overtly communist and socialist newspapers that do exist.
And if it was one of those little fringe papers, well, it wouldn't really matter.
It would be a non-issue.
But up until today, the New York Times is still the largest newspaper in America in terms of subscriptions, web traffic, or even just influence.
Usually, however the New York Times covers a particular story is then echoed by newsrooms across the whole country and actually across the whole world.
Like it or not, even though it is rapidly changing, the New York Times still does set the standard for news coverage, at least the news coverage of mainstream outlets.
And so the fact that the New York Times has decided to essentially turn a blind eye to what's been happening in China has allowed the Communist Party to operate with something akin to total impunity.
And they use this impunity to commit one of the most vile acts in human history.
That's because it was President Jiang Zemin who initiated, as a part of the overall persecution package, the industrial-scale forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, mostly from Falun Gong practitioners.
You see, starting in the year 1999, when Jiang Zemin was still in power, the number of organ transplants in China just skyrocketed.
China went from having 150 transplant centers in the year 1999 to 714 of them today.
They are now second only to the United States.
But these are not organ donations by any stretch of the imagination.
Because for the past two decades, China has not really had a functioning organ donation system.
Culturally, most Chinese people believe that they need to be buried with their organs intact.
And so the organ donations in China have been pretty much negligible.
In fact, the Beijing Red Cross stated back in the year 2011 that in the previous 20 years, up until that point, only 37 people nationwide registered to become organ donors.
Not 37 people in some random city.
37 people across all of China.
And yet still, somehow, the wait time for an organ in China is measured in weeks.
Compare that to the US, which has 156 million registered organ donors, and yet it takes 5 years to wait for a kidney.
But in China, you can get a kidney in a matter of weeks.
And if that kidney fails, they've been known to have another kidney lined up just in case.
And while most people assumed that these organs were coming from death row inmates, well, that explanation never made any sense.
Because according to independent researchers, on the absolute low end, China conducts something like 60,000 transplants a year, but they execute only somewhere between 2,000 and 8,000 prisoners a year.
It's a state secret what the true number is, but the highest estimate is 8,000 executions a year, which by the way, is already more than every other country on the planet combined, but it's still far from enough to account for all the transplants.
And so, independent researchers for the past two decades have been digging into this so-called mystery, and what they uncovered was a simple answer, that starting with the time of Jiang Zemin being in power in 1999, the Communist government of China has built an industrial-level pipeline of harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience, mostly from Falun Gong practitioners.
This has been substantiated by researchers across the whole world.
In fact, in the year 2019, the China Tribunal over in the UK, they reviewed all the available evidence of forced organ harvesting, and they concluded the following.
This final conclusion from the Tribunal.
It was covered with media reports by various types of newspapers.
on a significant scale, and that Falun Gong practitioners had been one and probably the main source of organ supply.
This final conclusion from the Tribunal.
It was covered with media reports by various types of newspapers, The Guardian, Reuters, Sky News, The New York Post, Epoch Times, and so on.
But conspicuously, The New York Times never reported on it.
Likewise, five days ago, over in Washington, D.C., the U.S.
House of Representatives held a panel to expose the practice of forced organ harvesting over in China, and they were pushing to ban health insurance companies from reimbursing people who went to China for organ transplants, since very likely someone will actually be killed for their organs if someone were to go to China to get one.
But again, conspicuously, the New York Times did not cover that panel.
And it appears that the reason that the New York Times didn't cover it might be because they have an unwritten policy of ignoring this particular subject.
Quote, "In 2016, New York Times reporter D.D. Kirsten Tatlow met with several Chinese transplant doctors and overheard their conversation suggesting that prisoners of conscience were used in China as a source of organs for transplants.
By that time, some human rights lawyers and researchers already had collected substantial evidence indicating that the CCP was indeed killing prisoners of conscience to fuel its booming transplant industry and that the primary target was Falun Gong.
After authoring two articles on China's organ transplant controversies that touched upon the issue of forced organ harvesting, Ms.
Tatlow wanted to investigate the matter further, but said she was blocked by her editors.
When giving her testimony to the China Tribunal, this reporter said the following, It was my impression that the New York Times, my employer at the time, was not pleased that I was pursuing these stories on organ transplant abuses, and after initially tolerating my efforts, made it impossible for me to continue.
Now, just for your reference, I will mention that we here at the Epoch Times, we did reach out to the New York Times for comment, and they got back to us with a statement of denial.
Here's part of what they wrote to us in an email: "We have extensively and independently reported on the Falun Gong movement for more than two decades, including revealing accounts of abuse in Chinese labor camps, covering the debate around forced organ donation in China, and examining its expanding global influence, particularly in American media and politics." Which sounds like good PR, except there's two problems with this statement: First of all, she wrote that the New York Times has covered the debate around forced organ donations in China.
Now, forced organ donations is a real funny way to describe someone being jailed for their spiritual beliefs and then being killed by a state doctor who harvests your organs.
Calling that processed forced organ donation is like calling theft forced property appropriation.
Furthermore, even though this statement of theirs said that they have covered the topic, well, an actual review of the articles, it showed that they haven't covered it with any serious extent, and that when they have covered it, they have, for the most part, used the communist framing and talking points when doing so.
And again, to get back to the reason why this all matters, the New York Times is, to this day, still the paper of record.
Whether we like it or not, newsrooms across the entire world maintain subscriptions to the New York Times, and they use the New York Times reporting as essentially a guidepost to what is considered mainstream.
And so when the New York Times does not cover industrial-scale forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience, Or when they do cover it, they refer to it as the debate around forced organ donations.
Well, it essentially gives cover to the communist regime and allows the CCP to act with impunity.
In fact, this report ends by asking a very, very simple question.
What would the modern world of today look like if the New York Times actually used their vast resources to expose the Chinese communist regime?
We can only wonder, what if the New York Times had investigated from the very beginning the actions the regime was taking to eradicate 70 to 100 million people rather than uncritically accepting Chinese official statements?
How many Falun Gong practitioners might still be alive?
However, the losing party with regard to the New York Times failings is not only Falun Gong, Today, the international community is struggling over how to deal with a rising and increasingly despotic China.
But the seeds for that repression were planted long before Xi Jinping came to power.
Indeed, the regime's campaign against Falun Gong has been the ultimate incubator for the CCP's brutal tactics over the past 25 years.
If the New York Times had truly covered the full scale of the story, the mass detentions, the widespread forced labor, the psychological transformation, the rising and personalized surveillance, and the organ transplant abuses, It is not unreasonable to consider that more international action would have been taken to counter these abuses and rein in the CCP's excesses.
Could we then be facing today a China that is less repressive and more law-abiding?
Could the subsequent crackdown against Uyghurs, which uses the same tactics, have been stymied?
Would foreign companies and policymakers have awoken sooner to the risks of doing business with the CCP?
And I personally will add to that, would we have allowed the Chinese Communist Party To cover up the COVID outbreak during the early weeks, which at least by some accounts actually led to the global pandemic.
These are questions whose answers we will perhaps never know.
If you'd like to read this report in its entirety, I'll throw a link to the PDF version of it.
You'll be able to find it down in the description box below this video if you want to dive into the weeds.
And also, as you're making your way down there to the description box, take a small detour to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this vital information can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm.
And then until next time, I'm your host Roman from the Epoch Times.
Stay informed.
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