The Dark Propaganda Strategy of Epoch Times
Progenitor of fake news delivers to local doorsteps
Last month, many local residents were amongst the thousands of Southern Californians who received a copy of The Epoch Times in their mail boxes — the newspaper “freedom loving people wanting news without spin prefer to read.” What The Epoch Times doesn’t tell you is that it’s connected to and has the same function as the long-running Chinese performing arts show, Shen Yun. You probably recognize the show from the ubiquitous billboards promoting the show. Shen Yun is the public relations — some say propaganda — arm of Falun Gong, a controversial spiritual movement which has been banned in China.
Online, at least up until recently, if you had the misfortune of forgetting to hit the commercial skip button after four seconds while watching a YouTube video, you probably would have seen part of the long Epoch Times’ commercial featuring Roman Balmakov peering out from behind a copy of the newspaper. While some journalists have described Balmakov as a Peter Parker/Spider-Man casting reject, he is in fact the online visage of The Epoch Times.
“Hey, I just read an unbelievable article in The Epoch Times ,” he says. Then he splays the paper on a table, showcasing a news story headlined “The Mysterious Origins of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] Virus,” a variation of former President Donald Trump’s term: the “China virus.”
The headline suggested that the pathogen could have emerged, maybe purposefully, from a lab in Wuhan, China. This has become a common rightwing claim. It’s important to keep in mind that most scientists believe that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans but the most recent report from the World Health Organization is inconclusive. Alternatively, the outlet was suggesting that the virus was a divine
instrument designed to punish the CCP and its supposed allies.
Balmakov was born, raised and educated in Ohio. Both he and his wife are Falun Gong adherents.
“It’s not just that,” Balmakov said, turning the page. “Look: an investigation into how the countries that have been most affected are the same ones that have been the most deeply infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party.” According to the investigation, Washington State’s early COVID-19 outbreak can be partly explained by the fact that Seattle was the first U.S. port to welcome Communist Chinese cargo ships, in the 1970s.
In April 2020, the Canadian postal union filed a special request to stop postal workers from delivering the newspaper, that called COVID-19 the “CCP virus” on its cover — arguing that it promoted Sinophobia and could put Asian letter carriers at risk. The Canadian government declined to take action. In May 2020, Balmakov appeared in a new ad again accusing the Chinese government of being responsible for COVID-19. No one has been ballsy enough to try this yet in the United States.
Despite the locally disseminated paper being printed in El Monte, CA, The Epoch Times is not a local newspaper. It doesn’t even pretend to be. Its content is largely supplied by writers in every other part of the country but California. And despite its claims that its content has “no spin,” the world it depicts in its pages is upside down, emblematic of a Trumpian-worldview.
Random Lengths News signed up for its daily newsletters to get the gist of the kind of headlines that would cross our newsfeed if the paper existed in the same media universe.
On Feb. 13, there was “Hypocrisy: Trump Team Shows Videos of Democrat Lawmakers During Impeachment Trial.” This story is referring to former President Donald Trump’s defense team attempting to make the case that Trump was engaging in “constitutionally protected speech” when he spoke at a rally that immediately preceded the Jan. 6 violence. Five people died as a result of events that day.
The Trump defense team called the impeachment trial a “witch hunt” and railed at Democrats for elevating “cancel culture” to the halls of Congress. In a case of false equivalence, they even suggested Democrats were hypocrites for impeaching Trump after some had previously voiced support for racial justice marches and criminal justice reform this past summer, none of which were aimed at overthrowing the government.
On Feb. 12, there was “White House Reassures Gun Control Groups It Will Fulfill ‘Ambitious’ Gun Control Agenda.” This is referring to President Joe Biden’s call for common sense gun control that includes background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets in a released statement. All these measures enjoy broad popular support.
Other headlines are either from opinion pieces reiterating pro-Trump talking points or more “news” stories that misrepresent factual reporting.
The one thing The Epoch Times does well is marketing itself. The Epoch Media Group spent $11 million on Facebook ads in 2019. In August 2019, Facebook banned The Epoch Times from advertising on its platform after finding that the newspaper broke Facebook’s political transparency rules. As Facebook banned it from advertising, the newspaper shifted its spending to YouTube, where it has spent more than $1.8 million on ads, some promoting conspiracy theories, since May 2018.
The news organization was founded with the aim of attacking China’s Communist government in support of the Falun Gong movement. As the government ramped up its repressive efforts against the movement, the movement started looking for allies wherever it could find them — perhaps thinking the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This led to the movement linking arms with far-right groups around the world particularly in Europe and the United States and participating in the manufacture and dissemination of the kind of fake news you’re likely to see in online forums and fake-news websites, except it’s putting it in print. The publication is funded by several nonprofit organizations that are not transparent as to who is supporting them.
Random Lengths News reached out to Nolen Higdon, one of the authors of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education, to gain insight to organizations like The Epoch Times and the One America Network. These are by far not the only progenitors of fake news nor are they all rooted in the far right ideological spectrum, which Higdon makes abundantly clear.
One of the fascinating things that kind of contextualizes the reach of something like The Epoch
Times, Higdon explained, is the fact that so many people are turning against legacy media. And I don’t just mean they’re choosing other options. There are a lot of studies that clearly show people no longer trust legacy media. By legacy media, Higdon is referring to news outlets that were once family owned companies going back several generations like the Times Mirror Company [owner of the Los Angeles Times], which was gobbled up by even bigger and older company, the Tribune Company.
“On the one hand, you know [fake news] is pretty poisonous for democracy. But on the other hand, a lot of the legacy media, through their fixation on profit models and garnering audiences through hyperpolarized content have actually done a disservice to themselves as journalists,” Higdon explained.
Higdon asked us to consider the cataclysmic failures like the allegations that weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq in 2003, the financial reporting around the Great Recession in 2009, or political reporting around the election in 2016.
“When things like Russia-gate [Higdon is referring to the mainstream media’s rush to assign blame for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Russian interference instead of the true culprit of vote suppression in key states] and things like that, a lot of people lost a lot of faith in legacy media,” Higdon said. “So that part is somewhat understandable. But ... people are looking for something new, something different. The statistics are pretty clear that people have turned to online spaces, but not online news media.”
Higdon noted that social media platforms and search engines have added another layer of complexity because their business model is predicated on keeping you glued to the screen on your phone so they can keep collecting and selling your data. The way this model keeps you on your screen is by confirming your views. As a result, search engines and social media platforms reinforce the beliefs or perspectives a user already has regardless of whether these beliefs are false or true. Higdon argues that an environment like this is ripe for an organization like The Epoch Times to succeed because they’re different from legacy media.
“With the right type of sensationalistic, clickbaity headlines, [outlets like The Epoch Times] could build quite a vast global audience for relatively cheap compared to legacy media 20 or 30 years ago,” Higdon said. “I think in The Epoch Times example makes perfect sense in this environment for why they’re resonating the way they are.”
The real interesting thing here is that in this particular moment The Epoch Times is able to portray itself as a victim of censorship and standard bearer of free speech.
Higdon said anybody who is censored or has content removed is a victim at that point, so The Epoch Times may be one of many. But making The Epoch Times the sole issue, or right-leaning victims more broadly, is a real distortion of reality, Higdon argues.
It should be noted here that Higdon does not believe publications like The Epoch Times should be censored, nor do the journalists and researchers affiliated with Project Censored. The solution, they argue, lies in educating the American public in media literacy.
Higdon thinks it’s really important to take a step back.
“As bad as The Epoch Times is and as dangerous as their intentions are, if we don’t look at structural changes, then we’re just going to be playing whacka-mole for the rest of our lives,” Higdon said.
“We can’t keep going after The Epoch Times and Fox news, then OAN and then this party or that party. Fake news has and always will exist,” Higdon said.
Higdon noted that one of the attributes humanity has acquired via evolution is that we’re able to believe falsehoods, citing Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In it, Harari talks about how you could never convince a monkey to give you all of its bananas with the promise of more bananas in the afterlife. But humans have the ability to believe in myth. So you’re never going to get rid of that out of the society.
“Our best hope is to really train people to be able to discern fact from fiction,” Higdon said. “So when they see something like an ad from The Epoch Times or one of their sensationalistic headlines, rather than react they try and investigate.
“The thing that concerns me about a lot of these conversations about these media outlets is that we fixate on how disgusting their false content is,” Higdon said. “We don’t look at the larger environment, which is the social media companies that are amplifying these messages and then there’s a citizenry that’s not trained with critical thinking skills to discern fact from fiction.”
“It would take a lot more time and a lot more effort,” Higdon said. “But I think it’s worth it because the other options on the table include censorship. So, yes. It’s going to take a lot of effort but the short-sighted fixes that we’re attempting now, [are]going to create way more damage.”
Higdon’s solution sounds like a process that would require a great deal of education, time and political uplift in order to make that happen. But also, I can’t help but be reminded of Ron Suskinds’ 2004 New York Times piece about the Bush presidency in which he quotes a senior advisor saying:
People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Protecting American democracy and ensuring that reality is moored by facts and science won’t wait for the exposure of every bit of fake news or until every American achieves media literacy. The world in which we live today is vastly different from the one inherited by the Trump administration.