J. Arthur Bloom said Wednesday that American media outlets doing the bidding of the Chinese might not be entirely ideologically driven.
Bloom, a Daily Caller alum and managing editor of The American Conservative, told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that Comcast had business ties to Beijing that could explain the company-wide trepidation in directly challenging the coronavirus claims coming out of China.
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Carlson, co-founder of the Caller, began the segment by noting that anti-Trump bias could be driving some media outlets to side with China, but Bloom said that at least with regard to Comcast — parent company of NBC Universal — the reasons could be all business. (RELATED: ‘We’ve Certainly Flattened The Economy’: Brit Hume Weighs In On Coronavirus Response)
“We’ve got this tremendous disconnect between what the American people actually think about China and what the media has been telling us,” Bloom explained. “Something like 70% of Americans blame China for it, and yet that’s not what we’ve been getting. So, why? There’s all the usual reasons that most reporters are liberal, and that they trust experts a lot, but they’re also in business with them.”
“The Chinese inserts in ‘The New York Times’ or ‘The Washington Post,’ those have gotten a lot of attention but also some of these bigger conglomerates like Comcast which owns NBC Universal, for example they are building a big theme park in Beijing which is a multibillion dollar investment which hasn’t come on line yet,” Bloom continued. “And so what does that mean? If Rachel Maddow were to come on and start bashing the Chinese government, you know, the communist party could come down and say, ‘Actually, we are not interested in opening or theme park anymore.'”
Carlson made the connection to the NBA and the fallout from just one owner voicing support for Hong Kong, and Bloom replied, “The NBA situation was a great example where just one owner of a team was critical of the Chinese and yet the hammer came down hard on the entire league. They are not known for a proportional response here.”
Bloom concluded by noting that a number of NBC stories had flirted with the communist party line — such as claims that the only new reported cases of coronavirus in China had come from foreigners and conversations about China as a global leader.
And while China recently expelled a number of American journalists from the country, Bloom said he couldn’t remember any NBC journalists being a part of that group. “I would think if they were covering China in a tough way it’s a badge of honor to be kicked out,” he said.