Exposed: American Legacy Media Took Favors From Communist China

by Ward Clark, RedState.com, July 29, 2026

This just in: China is not a friend of the United States. They may be a trading partner, but they are not our friends. Now, as further proof of that, we can point to evidence that the Chinese Communist Party may have been paying for complimentary news coverage from quite a laundry list of American legacy media figures.

Natalie Winters is a Washington correspondent for the Bannon War Room. On Monday, with now less than 100 days until the midterm elections, Natalie Winters has broken quite the story: It seems American legacy media members have been taking trips, funded by the Chinese Communist Party, to China - in return, of course, for favorable reporting.

NATALIE WINTERS: Leaked Documents Expose CCP Pay-for-Play Trips That Changed How Top American Journalists Covered China

Full Story At: https://t.co/En3fCmp7qr@nataliegwinters pic.twitter.com/QolUAwrYtW

— Bannon’s WarRoom (@Bannons_WarRoom) July 28, 2026

That's quite an assertion, and Natalie Winters has quite the list of names to go with it:

• Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist
• Matthew Yglesias, Vox co-founder
• Ronald Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst 
• Bradford Plumer, New York Times reporter
• Marjorie Miller, former Associated Press vice president
• Steve Clemons, former The Hill editor-at-large
• David Rohde, MS NOW senior national security reporter
• Jonathan Alter, NBC News and MSNBC political analyst
• David Sweeney, former NPR managing editor
• Daniel Gross, former Yahoo Finance columnist

That's just a sample. There are a lot more. And cast your optics over the media outlets implicated: The New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press, The Hill, and (shocker, I know) MS NOW/MSNBC.

What's more, Ms. Winters has information on what these "journalists" were treated to in China:

The access went far beyond conference rooms.

American journalists were taken on curated tours through China, including visits to Chinese military bases, by the same network seeking favorable coverage. pic.twitter.com/tLpVm1pGZf

— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) July 27, 2026

Note that a tour of a Chinese military installation isn't something offered to just any tourist. Meanwhile, Chinese nationals here in the United States have been remarkably curious about our military installations.

Remember when I said there was a quid pro quo? Soon enough, the free tours ended, the legacy media figures flew home, and went back to their offices and their keyboards. Then, the payback came:

Then came the coverage.

Shikha Dalmia published “China Bashing is for Losers.”

Bradford Plumer praised Beijing’s climate agenda.

Bruce Stokes warned that economic “decoupling” from China would “backfire.”

— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) July 27, 2026

There's a lot more, all of which you can find on Natalie Winters' Substack report here.

Here's the onion:

The (China-United States Exchange Foundation) CUSEF network also intersected repeatedly with the political apparatus surrounding Joe Biden.

OK, this is, as somebody once said, a big freakin' deal. 

To summarize, the American legacy media has been penetrated and co-opted at some pretty high levels by the Chinese Communist Party. I'm no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, mind you, but there's a lot of information here, and there are a lot of big names in big media, all of whom, with ten minutes with a search engine, you will determine have indeed taken an awfully conciliatory tone toward the Middle Kingdom in the last few years. It's not just the media, either. The Biden administration was involved in all this glad-handing, back-slapping, and trading of favors, in which China was paying for favorable coverage from the legacy media.

Describing what a shameful episode this is for the legacy media, well, there just aren't enough pejoratives.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of new, independent, non-Chinese-compromised media out there. You're looking at an example of it right now.