Antony Blinken defends Trump-era moves against Chinese media outlets in the US

Name: China expels American journalists from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post
Uploaded: 2021-04-28T21:03:34.000Z
Duration: 2 min 24 s
Description: China expels American journalists from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post

The US and China began restricting and expelling each other’s journalists last year

Blinken says that the State Department was ‘making sure we’re promoting transparency, not interfering with the media outlets and their ability to to report’

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Annapolis, Maryland on April 19. Photo: AFP

Robert Delaney

Published: 5:03am, 29 Apr 2021Updated: 5:30am, 29 Apr 2021

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday defended the measures that his predecessor Mike Pompeo took against the American operations of Chinese media outlets, calling them out for “undermining democracy”.

The US and China began restricting and expelling each other’s journalists in February 2020, when the State Department declared several mainland Chinese media outlets, including state news agency Xinhua and the state-run English-language newspaper China Daily, to be foreign government functionaries controlled by Beijing.

The move has required the media outlets’ staff members to register with the US government the same way that embassy and consular employees do.

Asked in a media round table to recognise World Press Day whether he has considered loosening these restrictions, Blinken said that the department was “making sure we’re promoting transparency, not interfering with the media outlets and their ability to to report on topics that they choose no matter how critical they happen to be of the United States government”.

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China expels American journalists from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post

Pompeo’s State Department followed its initial order four months later with similar designations targeting China Central Television; China News Service; People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official mouthpiece; and Global Times, a tabloid published by People’s Daily.

“We didn’t ban these state controlled media outlets, which continue to operate here, but we wanted to make sure that there was transparency and that people had full knowledge that what they were reading was, in effect, produced at the behest of the government in Beijing,” Blinken said.