The Washington Post makes money off of Chinese propaganda
Zachary Faria
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The Washington Post is in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to TikTok. Just follow the money.
The outlet’s defensive coverage of TikTok, the Chinese spyware app that Congress may soon ban, was bolstered by Taylor Lorenz. In her coverage, Lorenz twisted the words of Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) to make it seem as if Rodgers had said TikTok does not allow posts about the genocide of the Uyghurs or the Tiananmen Square massacre. In fact, Rodgers asked whether the app has removed that content before. (It has.)
THE WASHINGTON POST CAN’T STOP SHILLING FOR TIKTOK
The app has indeed removed content about the Uyghurs and banned a user for posting it despite TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew claiming that that is not the case. And yet Lorenz’s false portrayal of Rodgers’s comments managed to make it into her article, headlined “Congress had a lot to say about TikTok. Much of it was wrong.”
Lorenz adds her piece to a series of Washington Post defenses of TikTok, which includes columnist Max Boot claiming that the Chinese spyware app isn’t any worse than the social media apps that aren’t controlled by the CCP. Earlier this month, Boot warned that the bipartisan opposition to China’s genocidal communist regime was a “collective delusion.”
So how did the paper warning that “democracy dies in darkness” become a China denialist publication?
For starters, the paper has a dedicated TikTok content team, which it has expanded at least twice in the last year, boasting that it was “building on the momentum it has gained engaging new audiences on the highly-downloaded app.”
On top of that, the March 18 edition of the Washington Post contained a wraparound advert for TikTok. According to the Washington Post’s advertising pricing as of February 2021, ads on pages A2, A3, or A5 are worth $220 per column inch. TikTok’s ad was a double-sided 1.5-page wrap around the A section itself, which at that rate would be $74,600 for a single day’s ad. And TikTok was spreading the money around with a massive ad blitz, including Politico, Axios, the Washington Metro system, and Union Station.
This is a pattern for the Washington Post, though. Before this, the outlet was already taking money to promote China Daily, the English-language state-controlled media outlet for the CCP. Back in 2011, James Fallows noted that the Washington Post devoted a whole section to the Chinese outlet online as a “paid supplement to the Washington Post,” though you would have to look very carefully to discern that the outlet’s “China Watch” was paid advertising for CCP state-media.
This history, which stretches all the way up to the present, should color the Washington Post’s coverage of TikTok, which is deferential to the app at best and dishonestly defensive at worst. The Washington Post has had a financial stake in Chinese propaganda for years. Of course it is going to go to great lengths to defend a Chinese spyware app.