Dec. 17, 2024 - Epoch Times
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| On Star Outro Music | |
| Jan Yee Kellick is the senior editor of the Epoch Times. | |
| You know, the Epoch Times is a staple of the world. | |
| You know, it's so often when I travel the globe, people say, do you read the Epoch Times? | |
| Or someone will send me articles from Epoch Times. | |
| So I had an opportunity to sit and get to know Jan. | |
| I said, man, we've got to sit down, because people really need to understand the Epoch Times. | |
| Welcome to our national broadcast, and thank you so much for joining us. | |
| Well, thanks so much, Armstrong. | |
| Fantastic to be here. | |
| So let me get this straight. | |
| You have 35 publications around the world. | |
| You're not allowed in mainstream China. | |
| You have the NTD, which is the Nietzschean dynasty. | |
| They consider you to be a right-wing organization. | |
| You oppose Communist China. | |
| You also believe that the Chinese have been manipulated and spreading propaganda in the United States for a long time, and their ultimate goal is to use this propaganda warfare to overtake America, and you fight against that. | |
| How long has the Epoch Times been around? | |
| Well, since 2000. It was actually founded by Chinese Americans. | |
| It's kind of an amazing story of the American dream happening, actually. | |
| So my parents came from communist Poland. | |
| They're also kind of a story of, let's say, the North American dream. | |
| But Epoch, well, our founder actually came from, he was in the student movement in 89. You know, people have heard about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. | |
| He wasn't actually there, but this was a movement across the entire country. | |
| And a lot of them that kind of made it and weren't too much on the government's radar and could got scholarships. | |
| He ended up going to Georgia Tech. | |
| Kind of a brilliant theoretical physicist. | |
| And he ended up, you know, and in 99, when the Chinese regime kind of found its new target, it wasn't the democracy dissidents or activists. | |
| It was the spiritual group Falun Gong practitioners of that. | |
| In order to justify it, they basically created, you know, what they always do, which is oodles and oodles of hate propaganda, basically attempting to demonize these people. | |
| We see these kind of tactics all over the place often. | |
| Atlanta, he thought, hey, I can actually do something now. | |
| I'm in America. | |
| There's a First Amendment here and we can tell the truth about what's happening in Communist China. | |
| What is it that we as Americans don't understand about how the Chinese operate? | |
| A great many things. | |
| I think one of the most important things, it's very, very difficult For people that grow up in a free society, or a mostly free society, to actually understand what it's like to live under a totalitarian regime. | |
| I'll give you an example, okay? | |
| In my family, we had a rule. | |
| I grew up, I came out upon arrival, I grew up in Canada, okay? | |
| And in my family, the rule was, you can say nothing that we talk about in the family, outside the family. | |
| And my parents were tough to deal with. | |
| So I had all this stuff I wanted to discuss with my friends, but I knew it would be treason to say anything. | |
| And I only realized 20 years, maybe 30 years later, really why this was the rule. | |
| Because in a totalitarian society, Everybody is incentivized to spy and report on everybody else. | |
| And you assume that to be the default, unless there's people that you have deep, that you've developed deep trust with. | |
| And even then, you know, when going back to Poland, when they revealed that all the dossiers that were held after 89, after democracy came to Poland and people got to see, you know, who it was that was actually spying on them. | |
| It was wives spying on husbands. | |
| It was priests reporting confessions. | |
| It was everything, right? | |
| And that's a mind job. | |
| Imagine, you know, if I, in our society, if I think everybody's a potential spy on me, how would we behave differently? | |
| That's just one thing, but I think it's a very important one. | |
| Explain to us the structure of epoch times. | |
| Take us inside the organization. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, let's start, let me do a couple of data points. | |
| First of all, our truth and tradition is our tagline. | |
| I think in Wikipedia, one of the few things that's actually true about us, it says political orientation, anti-communist. | |
| We don't expressly say that, but I think it would be fair, right? | |
| We see that as a bad system. | |
| In terms of structure, we developed quite... | |
| Every office has a lot of independents. | |
| And how it functions, okay? | |
| Around the central editorial vision where truth and tradition would be kind of the simplest approximation of that. | |
| But based in New York. | |
| We're based in New York City. | |
| And you have offices in Washington DC. Correct. | |
| You have them in Texas. | |
| Correct. | |
| You have them throughout California. | |
| Yep, Northern, Irvine, LA, and so Orange County, LA, and also the Bay Area. | |
| And you also have the new Tang Dynasty, NTD, the television division. | |
| So NTD is our sister TV network, and we've kind of... | |
| Let me just mention that NTD started with a similar mission. | |
| Epoch Times started in Chinese language to tell the truth to Chinese people in America, We were being propagandized by Chinese media in America, okay? | |
| And then it changed when they realized, my goodness, all these American media are just taking these Chinese Communist Party talking points and regurgitating them, right? | |
| So we have to do something in English. | |
| I mean, these were the very early years, and then it kind of grew into something much bigger than that. | |
| We want to talk about what that grew into when we come back on this edition of the Armstrong Williams Show. | |
| The senior editor. | |
| Of the Epoch Times is our guest. | |
| We'll be back. | |
| Jan Yee Kellek is our guest. | |
| He's the Epoch Times senior editor. | |
| What have you expanded into? | |
| And what is your main goal? | |
| And why is it that so many people are fascinated? | |
| And why is it that the mainstream media does everything it can to discredit you as a conspiratorial, right-leaning media empire? | |
| We live in really crazy times, Sam Armstrong. | |
| I could not have predicted that just doing something really simple, which is what we do, which is focus on truth-telling. | |
| You know how they say, you know, oh, that didn't age well, or that aged well, talking about news stories and so forth. | |
| Our content that we do, both in video and written, ages incredibly well. | |
| And the secret is actually the simplest thing ever. | |
| It's just simply try to seek the truth. | |
| That's our highest goal. | |
| And report it fairly and honestly to people so they can kind of figure out what's going on in the world, make up their own minds about it. | |
| You know, what is fascinating has been your coverage on the Israel-Hamas war. | |
| Okay. | |
| And how you've even challenged platforms like TikTok. | |
| And while people may say it's pro-Israeli, pro-Jew, you say, no, we have reporters, we have people on the ground. | |
| We report the truth and the facts. | |
| Talk about that coverage and how you've come to your own conclusions about what the real situation is in the Middle East. | |
| This is a really difficult problem. | |
| Let me put it this way. | |
| No one wants war. | |
| No one wants people dying. | |
| Palestinian, Israeli, doesn't matter. | |
| We don't want that. | |
| But it's like, I find there's almost every issue we try to cover, right? | |
| There's this kind of moral imprimatur that's thrown into it. | |
| When you cover it, as we do, I think, honestly, people will assume, well, you're on one side or another. | |
| How do we cover it? | |
| We do our best to try to report what's happening there with the best of our sources. | |
| We actually have an Israeli edition. | |
| It's different than, it's actually a monthly magazine over there because every area kind of developed on its own. | |
| So we have a lot of very good on-the-ground information coming in. | |
| I mean, I don't know what to tell you. | |
| We report on it. | |
| For American thought leaders, for my show, I did an interview, for example, with Sarah Idan. | |
| Sarah Idan was Miss Iraq Universe. | |
| Miss Universe Iraq. | |
| And she, some years ago, took a selfie with Miss Israel. | |
| And as a result of that, her family actually had to flee Iraq. | |
| And it's just, anyway, it's a fascinating reality. | |
| Why would that be, right? | |
| We're trying to kind of create context for people to understand. | |
| That's the reason I mention this, right? | |
| And Sarah, of course, has a lot of thoughts about this particular conflict and what's going on. | |
| Why do you think there's such solidarity with wealthy, affluent, a lot of young people with Hamas and the Palestinians? | |
| I think, fundamentally, I think people, well, with sort of with older people, I think a lot of people are very ill-informed. | |
| And number two, I think when it comes to younger people, there are incredibly powerful tools of influence at play. | |
| I mean, you know, when you look at, for example, the Twitter files revelations or the Missouri versus Biden lawsuit, a lot of people will not be familiar with these. | |
| But basically, these are disclosures of showing us how Powerful entities, including the government, non-profits, work with social media to censor certain types of content and push other kinds of content, okay? | |
| So that's in America. | |
| Now we have, for example, TikTok. | |
| You mentioned that earlier, right? | |
| TikTok is, and I actually do talk about this kind of at length. | |
| I could talk about it for an hour, how TikTok is related to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese regime. | |
| But basically, The people at TikTok are bound by Chinese law to follow the regime's guidance, okay? | |
| So, there's the espionage side that's possible, and there's also the manipulation side that's possible. | |
| And you can see, in terms of, let's call it pro-Hamas content on TikTok, is orders of magnitude greater than what you would call, you know, pro-Israel content. | |
| Okay, now why is that? | |
| And these tools can shape, and I've done multiple, multiple shows with people who are demonstrating, like Dr. Robert Epstein, how easy it is to influence people's decisions using these social media and even technologies like Google. | |
| People, because you also have tentacles in China. | |
| What did we miss on the Wuhan lab and COVID-19? | |
| It's a sad story, okay? | |
| Because in April of 2020, we did a documentary. | |
| And this is, you know, just a few months after that we knew the pandemic had began. | |
| Which, I mean, the documentary is very simple. | |
| It's like, looks like a duck, walks like a duck. | |
| It's probably a duck. | |
| There's a lab. | |
| That's doing exactly the kind of experimentation which would lead to exactly the kind of virus that came out, which has never occurred in nature before. | |
| It makes much more sense that it's from a lab than it just randomly happening. | |
| You know, six striking, six bolts of lightning to the head would be the natural version of that, okay? | |
| It's very unlikely. | |
| That's my point. | |
| So, a lot of the problem was, the Chinese Communist Party line was, this is natural. | |
| And unfortunately, you know, Dr. Fauci and the U.S. institutions decided that they're going to follow that for their own particular intentions. | |
| Senator Rand Paul has an incredibly thick book right now out explaining, it's called Deception, explaining why that was, okay? | |
| But if people actually were truth-seeking, And we're reporting truth-seeking information. | |
| It was absolutely not rocket science to understand that the lab leak was the vastly more likely scenario. | |
| And we'll never know for sure, because the smoking gun evidence has been destroyed, of course, right, in communist China. | |
| So, but, you know, logic, basic logic and inference dictates it's a lab leak, of course. | |
| Of course it was. | |
| Yankee Kelly is our guest. | |
| He's the Epoch Times senior editor. | |
| I'm R.P. Sean Williams, and we'll be back. | |
| We're back with Yanyi Kelley, Epoch Times senior editor. | |
| Let's talk about gender-driven journalism in America and the world today. | |
| A shocking development in a way because, you know, In order to have a free society, this is what I've realized, it's absolutely critical to have a free and fair press. | |
| And for whatever reason, and I've explored this extensively and we could talk about that if you want, but a great many media, including some of the largest media in our country, have decided to follow a different school of journalism, which some people would call it agenda-driven and some people just call it activist. | |
| I actually think the official term for it is activist journalism. | |
| And over the past, certainly decade, there's been a huge shift in what's acceptable in journalism. | |
| In many cases, these, especially younger journalists, and they're taught this, by the way, in places like Columbia Journalism School. | |
| I've looked at the curriculum, right? | |
| That there's a certain view of the world that people are supposed to believe. | |
| And all our journalism is going to cater to that. | |
| If there's something that doesn't cater to that, it's that there's a reality That's reportable, that doesn't cater to that view. | |
| If we have to report on it, we put it on page 30 or something like that, right? | |
| Or we don't talk about it at all. | |
| But we push the stuff that is the correct view. | |
| And what is the price for this when the smoke clears? | |
| I mean, I hope it's not a free society, the loss of a free society. | |
| I mean, I think it's that grave if we don't fix this. | |
| You know, Epoch Times is so massive. | |
| How are you able to gain such massive distribution, such a massive subscription base so quickly? | |
| You know, I'm going to keep going back to this. | |
| It's been tough Because as we kept growing... | |
| Well, you gave it away at the beginning. | |
| We gave it away at the beginning, but we realized that, you know, we're experimental. | |
| We were trying all sorts of different business models, right? | |
| How's this gonna work? | |
| But it turned out that people are willing to pay for news that they understand is truth-seeking. | |
| That is, I mean, I keep beating this drum, but I actually think that's the main reason, right? | |
| 1.5 million Americans, a bit more now, I think, are deeply committed to knowing what's going on in the world and having a fair view, and that's why we've been growing. | |
| I mean, I don't have a better explanation. | |
| There's all sorts, you know. | |
| You remember something called Russiagate, right? | |
| Right now, most people understand that Donald Trump was not a Russian agent. | |
| I mean, the whole concept was preposterous on its face at the beginning. | |
| But there's some portion of the population that even to this day, because they were propagandized by media who wanted to believe this or were doing it disingenuously, that he's some sort of Russian asset. | |
| It's crazy, right? | |
| Of course, we reported honestly on this, on the information that was available from the beginning. | |
| That's what I mean by aged well. | |
| But people remember that. | |
| And now we have a lot of people that come to us because they say, oh, you guys reported on this honestly back then, and then take your issue. | |
| But how does the epoch tribe... | |
| Instill that discipline, that integrity, that fairness with thousands throughout thousands of employees around the world. | |
| It's very difficult. | |
| Very good hiring practices that involve a lot of kind of insight into What people really believe and how they want to be. | |
| But there is another, there's kind of a silver lining in a way, because there's a lot of truth-seeking people out there, including journalists. | |
| And they were looking for a home. | |
| They realized, oh, I can't work for, I'm not going to name specific names, but I can't work for this media anymore. | |
| And we end up getting them. | |
| Like, for example, our assistant DC bureau chief here in DC is from CNN. He worked there for 20 years, did amazing work. | |
| But now he's with us. | |
| So what is your ambition for the future with Epoch Times? | |
| Because obviously, when you talk about those numbers, 1.5 million subscriptions, that can match the New York Times or any other major daily in the world. | |
| Many of them just don't have those kind of numbers. | |
| They can't sustain it. | |
| Yeah, I think, I mean, by our estimates, in terms of paid subscribers, we're the number four newspaper in America right now. | |
| And some people say, well, it's not audited. | |
| Well, I don't trust the auditors, frankly. | |
| What do you think from your coverage of the election and how the election is being covered, the Biden White House? | |
| Your coverage in the Epoch Times is very unique. | |
| You always bring in a perspective or a source that you say, you know, I've not read that before. | |
| I've not heard that. | |
| We, a lot of, this type of environment where this act, what happens is, right, as we've shifted to activist journalism, there's a reaction to that. | |
| And there's, it's almost like you feel like you have to be an activist in the other direction. | |
| And I know, I have that feeling too sometimes, when you're being kind of, when all this material is being thrown at you that you know, it just kind of doesn't make a ton of sense. | |
| You have to have a ton of discipline to try to provide an honest picture. | |
| And this is tough with Israel, Hamas, all these with Russia-Ukraine war. | |
| There's such... | |
| Let me put it this way. | |
| Information war, which is... | |
| You actually alluded to this early, which is a central part of how the Chinese Communist Party is attacking America. | |
| It's just one prong, but a huge one, has become kind of a dominant feature Another word for it is propaganda. | |
| In all that you exposed in Epoch Times, you got to give people hope. | |
| You got to help them believe that everything that is not lost, there's still good and things worthwhile fighting for in the world. | |
| Oh no, I totally agree with that and that's actually one reason a lot of people come to us. | |
| We hear this from a lot of people that you somehow approach a lot of these really difficult subjects in a kind of a positive way often, you know, when it's possible. | |
| How can someone who heard about the Epoch Times for the first time subscribe and find out more about it? | |
| Theepochtimes.com. | |
| Go to our website. | |
| You can also go to readepoch.com if you're ready to subscribe. | |
| Readepoc.com, you can do that immediately. | |
| Yann Yikele, thank you so much for joining us as this Epoch Times senior editor. | |
| It's been a very wonderful, insightful conversation, one that I actually look forward to. | |
| And thank you for joining us for this edition of the Armstrong Williams Show. |
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