March 27, 2025 - Epoch Times
02:44
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Carrie Lake initially talked about, for example, setting up a dedicated unit within VOA to investigate Chinese illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive activity throughout the region. | |
| And VOA is very well placed to connect those dots. | |
| It's hard for, you know better than anybody. | |
| When you cover the CCP, your advertising can get cut, you're marginalized, you're discredited. | |
| So imagine if you're a little newspaper in Solomon Islands and you want to cover what China is doing in your country. | |
| It's nearly impossible. | |
| And I'm using that as a specific case because there is a very good news organization in Solomon Islands called In-Depth Solomons that was beat. | |
| Being funded in part through USAID, it was going to other agencies and that was going to that. | |
| And they're having a hard time now. | |
| They can't do that sort of coverage. | |
| They're not going to be able to get local advertising to support themselves. | |
| So they were doing what basically VOA should have been doing anyway, but they were doing it on the ground in their own voice and with incredible courage. | |
| Some of those journalists have now been laid off. | |
| What typically happens in those situations is the pro-PRC government offers them a job within the government. | |
| Come and do marketing for us or come and do PR for us. | |
| You've got a journalist who has a family. | |
| Their parents might need medical care. | |
| Their kids need school fees. | |
| The source of funding has been cut off. | |
| They need To survive. | |
| So they get diverted into the system. | |
| They know it. | |
| Doesn't make them feel good. | |
| But they need to be a good parent. | |
| They need to be a good child. | |
| And this is their only option for doing it. | |
| So that's an example of where the cuts are directly hurting Chinese coverage. | |
| For example, Broca's story about how the Minister of Police in Solomons had a bank account with a Chinese national and the son of the former Prime Minister of Solomons, which is the one that switched the country from Taiwan to China, in Singapore. | |
| That is an incredibly important piece of information that changes the way you look at policing, for example, in Solomon Islands. | |
| It wouldn't have happened if they wouldn't have been getting funding from the U.S. Now, there have been different sorts of funding to achieve very specific political goals, and that's the problem. | |
| It sort of all became kind of enmeshed. |
Export Selection