Frank Gaffney: What Bloomberg Has Done Is in the Service of the Mortal Enemy of the United States

Frank Gaffney, executive chairman and founder of the Center for Security Policy, said on Wednesday Michael Bloomberg’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — including “cooperation in the field of media” according the official Chinese government documents — amounts to a subversion of America’s national interest for the benefit of its primary geopolitical adversary.

Gaffney drew on revelations detailing the Bloomberg-China ties in Alex Marlow’s Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.

“[Breaking the News] is focusing in on a vastly larger problem, but the microcosmic example of what Michael Bloomberg has done — both personally and with his corporate enterprises and that vast wealth — is in the service of the mortal enemy of the United States, namely the Chinese Communist Party.”

He continued, “What [Michael Bloomberg] has done specifically by facilitating, enabling, and greatly expanding [the CCP’s] ability to subvert our country —  and for that matter, others around the world — by using his platforms to disseminate what is — let’s face it — Chinese communist propaganda, is scandalous.
LISTEN:

Gaffney remarked, “I’m so delighted you’re holding [Michael Bloomberg] to account, and I hope this will be the beginning of a very serious pushback, not only against Bloomberg but the other corporate media types who are acting similarly in bed with the Chinese Communist Party, [which is] detrimental to our country.”

Bloomberg’s cooperation with the CCP is an example of a broader trend of U.S. news media alliances with the one-party state, Gaffney stated:

To give a couple of other examples, of course the Washington Post and the New York Times — and I think the Wall Street Journal — garner millions of dollars per year by publishing outright Chinese communist propaganda as so-called news inserts or advertising supplements in their newspapers. You have people who are in the business who are being trained or wined and dined by various Chinese influence operations for the purpose of ensuring that they will promote the party line.

Marlow explained one method of China’s purchasing of propaganda in English-language news media, which he documented in Breaking the News.

“They’ve actually been paid to print propaganda,” he said. “They’re called advertorials. They’re advertisements that look like articles that appear largely online for the [New York Times], but in other papers they were actually worse. I kind of I stumbled on when I was researching the Times, but the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were actually paid millions of dollars by the Chinese to publish these sort of things.”

He added, “The Washington Post publishes China Daily advertorials that appeared in the paper and online, and the Los Angeles Times Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, and others all took communist cash in order to print these [advertorials]. It is propaganda. It literally is Chinese propaganda, and it’s not even [just in] America. The Daily Telegraph in London, which is one of their reasonably decent papers, did the same thing. It just shows you the influence operation is so bad.”

Gaffney noted China’s influence operations to undermine the U.S. are not limited to the development of financial ties with news media outlets. The one-party state similarly procures influence with politicians and their families, the entertainment industry, non-governmental organizations and think tanks, and academia.

Gaffney added, “Thank you for the public service you’ve rendered with Breaking the News. This is a really important book, and I’ve been waiting it with approximately the anticipation of the second coming.”

Gaffney is vice chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.