Is China's Influence Over U.S. Media Expanding?

The Chinese Communist Party, and its media satellites, have come to exert great power over what average Americans see and hear.

While the United States has some of the strongest media free speech protections in the world, its media networks are increasingly falling under the influence of a foreign government whose priorities are altogether different.

Chinese state-owned media companies have been quietly buying up shares of major American networks in recent years. It was recently revealed, for instance, that China owns a majority share in WCRW, a Washington, D.C.-based talk radio station.

However, China’s influence does not stop at direct ownership: it also extends to advertisement revenue, often targeted at sizable but vulnerable news companies. China Daily a publication owned by the Chinese Communist Party, has in the past year spent more than a quarter of a million dollars advertising in USA Today as well as similarly large sums to the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, andTime magazine.

Indeed, the relationship between the Chinese government and the American media can often operate as something of a feedback loop. After the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a Chinese news outlet directly referenced an article inThe New York Times in order to accuse the United States of “severe human rights problems.”

China has also taken advantage of rhetoric about “systemic racism,” propagated by organizations like Black Lives Matter, in order to accuse the United States of widespread human rights abuses, and to shift scrutiny off of its own treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other minority groups.

The federal government has made some attempts to crack down on the growing foreign influence in media. In 2020, President Trump took steps to rein in the app TikTok, over concerns that it could be used to export data to the Chinese government. Around the same time, the Justice Department attempted to force China Daily to disclose its payments to American news agencies.

But those efforts have largely stalled under the Biden administration, with several Republican senators recently requesting the White House for a long-overdue update.

The impact of foreign, and particularly Chinese, influence on American news media can be difficult to fully trace. Still, one thing is certain: as always, Americans should consume their media with an eye of skepticism and a mind prepared to think critically about all they encounter.