During a recent evening White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing, President Donald Trump questioned a reporter on whether or not she works for a Chinese-run television network. She was asking about Chinese governments, such as Huawei and Alibaba, donating medical supplies and personal protective equipment to the United States.
“Who are you working for, China?” Trump asked.”Hong Kong Phoenix TV,” the reporter replied.”Who owns that, China?” Trump pressed. “Is it owned by China? Is it owned by the state?””No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s a private-owned company.”
Now Phoenix TV is technically “privately-owned” but their biggest investor is Chinese state-owned China Mobile. Their content is subject to dictates of the Central Communist Propaganda Dept. It was revealed back in 2018 that Phoenix TV was used to spread propaganda and promote the policies of the communist government in Beijing. The goal was to garner support for the regime’s policies and downplay atrocities, like human rights abuses.
The Hoover Institution, an American public policy think tank and research institution, called Phoenix TV the “semi-official” Chinese media outlet in Hong Kong, and that a former Chinese military officer who is close to the Beijing officials owns that network.
This explains why Phoenix TV is particularly favorable to the Chinese Communist Party, using it as an outlet for airing televised confessions by various detained CCP critics, most notably, all five Hong Kong booksellers abducted by Chinese security forces in late 2015. This was in regards to unprecedented accusations of Beijing’s meddling in Hong Kong’s judicial independence. The five missing booksellers all reappeared and confessed to crimes of “illegal business operations” in an aired program on…you guessed it. Phoenix TV.
News networks across the world claimed these TV confessions to be forced and scripted. Mr. Lam Wing Kee, one of the five men who worked at the publishing house that sold the books criticizing China’s leaders, said in a news conference shortly after the Phoenix TV interview “It was a show and I accepted it. They gave me a script. I had to follow the script. If I did not follow it strictly, they would ask for a retake.”
While Lam Wing Kee returned to Hong Kong, the others were yet to be found. Some believe the four were detained because of a book about President Xi Jinping.
Since then, the Chinese government has continually pumped out propaganda over the Wuhan Coronavirus. Instead of being honest about the virus, the regime sought to cover things up for as long as they could. The World Health Organization continually ignored Taiwan’s alerts about the virus and reiterated Chinese talking points, including the biggest one: that the virus does not transmit from human-to-human (which we now know is not the case).
Something here is fishy…Good to know Trump sees past these communist-washed media frenzies.
