The criticism against China continues this week as Florida Senator Rick Scott (R) issued a letter to David Chavern, the President and CEO of News Media Alliance and American Press Institute, calling for the U.S. Media to stop collaborating with China Daily, a communist Chinese publication.
In the letter, Senator Scott points out that China Daily is “a publication owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China,” which “collaborates with leading global media organizations” and publishes “a supplement along with major U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.”
This, Senator Scott calls alarming because Communist China is “a regime that has no respect for freedom of speech or human rights.”
So, “by providing Communist China free reign to publish their propaganda alongside our media, we are giving the Chinese government an opportunity to promote values antithetical to the freedoms guaranteed in our Bill of Rights.”
With this, Scott questioned, “how can American media companies promote Communist China’s message while they continue to violate the rights of their people and threaten our values around the world?”
Citing a November 6th issue of China Daily, Senator Scott detailed that a story read, “the wish for Western-style liberal democracy is a malignant virus that infects places with weakened ideological immune systems.”
This, he calls “propaganda that American newspapers are allowing to be paired with their journalist’s work.”
Echoing criticism that Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) has directed to China this year, Senator Scott argued that China is “stealing our intellectual property and technology,” and they “refuse to open their markets to foreign goods as required by their agreement to be part of the WTO.”
Furthermore, “they are militarizing the South China Sea” and “they continue to attack religious freedom by detaining more than one million Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority group, in internment and re-education camps, and have not lived up to the agreement to give Hong Kong autonomy and freedom.”
Ultimately, Scott called for Chavern to take the issue seriously, and he urged Chavern’s “members to reconsider their relationship with China Daily.”
