Reports of a Chinese marketing firm penetrating U.S. media websites to plant pro-China stories were not surprising, Fred Fleitz, vice chair of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security, told Newsmax on Tuesday.
The Washington Post reported Monday that Shanghai Yihuan Cultural Communication Co., Ltd., also known as Haixun Press, planted articles that appeared in financial news subdomains of at least 32 websites of U.S. news outlets — including the Arizona Republic and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The stories were from Chinese state media and offered assessments of U.S. policymakers and academics, and others critical of Beijing.
"The Chinese Communist Party opposes the democratic rights that we enjoy here, but it's happy to exploit those rights in the United States," Fleitz told "John Bachman Now." "This isn't the first time it tried this.
"Remember those Chinese police stations; they were abusing diplomatic treaties."
Fleitz was referring to clandestine Chinese "police stations" that were discovered earlier this year in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston. The outposts reportedly were tasked with spying on Chinese nationals.
"Now they're abusing freedom of the press," Fleitz said. "All of the American press sites that took this information, they need to be scrutinized. Some of them may have known where this information was coming from, and if they didn't, they should have known about it.
"This is an abuse of our system, but it's not the first time."
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