President Trump declassified hundreds of pages of intelligence documents showing Beijing obtained more than 220 million voter registration records since 2020 — and the American news media barely covered it.
Now we know why.
China’s state-run China Daily paid $19 million to major U.S. media outlets over a four-year period ending in 2020, according to Department of Justice records. The Wall Street Journal received $6 million. The Washington Post took $4.6 million. The New York Times accepted $50,000.
Trump didn’t hold back when he connected the dots last week.
“They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.”
China analyst Gordon Chang told Just the News the mainstream press is treading carefully because they don’t want to anger Beijing — and lose future revenue.
“If President Trump were going to lie, they could have covered it afterwards and said he did, but he didn’t lie. What he did was he stuck to the facts. And shame on CNN and shame on the others for not carrying this, because you know what they are doing right now, it’s not just the hatred of Trump, but also I think they have an eye on Beijing as well, and they didn’t want to anger the Chinese because they saw a commercial advantage on staying on Beijing’s side,” Chang said.
“So we’ve got a real problem here with our media.”
The China Daily payments funded advertising that mimicked actual newspaper articles — including a four-page insert in The Des Moines Register attacking Trump’s tariff policy during the 2018 cycle. The insert was disguised as news under the title “China Watch.”
Trump accused China of election meddling at the time.
After the 2020 disclosure, The New York Times told Voice of America it stopped accepting branded content from state-run outlets. But The Wall Street Journal still lists China Daily as a partner on a dedicated website today.
Security experts previously told Just the News that commercially available voter data is NOT the same as what Beijing obtained. The intelligence documents show China accessed sensitive information like phone numbers — data not sold commercially.
Yet several major outlets dismissed Trump’s declassification as “old news” or downplayed the hack as no big deal.
Self-censoring to protect China access
This isn’t the first time American media has soft-pedaled China coverage to protect business interests.
In 2013, The New York Times reported that Bloomberg News killed investigative stories into financial ties between Chinese Communist Party leaders and the country’s wealthiest men. Bloomberg L.P. sells financial terminals in China — a market worth protecting.
Then-CEO Peter Grauer gave a speech saying the company should have reconsidered articles that “deviated from its core coverage of business news, because they jeopardized the huge sales potential for its products in the Chinese market,” The New York Times reported in 2014.
Several executive editors and respected journalists resigned from Bloomberg News over the censorship.
Hollywood and the China green light
It’s not just newspapers. The entertainment giants that own major news outlets — Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. — have even deeper financial entanglements with Beijing.
Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery (which owns CBS News and CNN) had to seek Chinese regulatory approval for their proposed $110 billion merger this year.
Paramount initially removed the Taiwanese flag from a jacket patch in the 2019 Top Gun: Maverick trailer — a move widely seen as kowtowing to China. After social media backlash, the studio restored the flag in the final release.
Under Chinese media law, displaying the Taiwan flag is illegal.
Tencent, a Chinese tech giant, was an original investor in the Top Gun sequel but later backed out for fear the pro-American military themes would anger Communist Party officials, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Trump’s intel drop revealed Beijing’s massive voter-data hack — and the Intelligence Community kept it from him while he was president.
The media that took millions from China’s propaganda arm stayed quiet.
Patriots are noticing.
