In what can only be described as a sorry excuse for journalism, NBC News’s Kimmy Yam loaned her byline to an activist who argued that criticizing the Chinese Communist Party is racist.
The target of the hit piece sloppily disguised as news is Tim Ryan, the Democratic congressman from northeastern Ohio running for Senate. Ryan released an ad claiming that it is “us versus China” and “capitalism versus communism.” A 2014 report found that Ohio lost over 100,000 jobs to China from 2001 to 2013, primarily in manufacturing, explaining the theme of Ryan’s ad.
Yam then turned her news piece over to activists who whined that any criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, by body count the most anti-Asian organization in world history, puts Asian Americans at risk. Brad Jenkins, the president of the AAPI Victory Fund, said, “Creating a villainous country and claiming that that’s the reason why Ohio has lost manufacturing jobs — not only is that bad policy, it’s racist.”
Gee, won’t someone think of China’s poor, genocidal regime?
The “boogeyman” of China leads to attacks on Asian Americans, according to Jenkins. Yam quoted another activist who tried to claim that Ryan is actually costing himself votes because Asian Americans apparently vote in lockstep and are extremely defensive of China’s reputation. The solution here appears to be never criticizing China.
Yam’s “news” piece is an activist press release — and an embarrassing one at that. Yam has a track record of doing this, too, downplaying and dismissing the idea that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab. Yam has wanted everyone to forget that COVID-19 came from China, a country whose government lied about the virus repeatedly and left the world ill-equipped to respond to the pandemic in the early days. And Yam has a track record of creating news pieces out of frivolous activist complaints: She claimed, through the lazy “experts say” framework she typically uses, that discrimination cases against Ivy League schools were using Asians “as pawns to uphold white privilege.”
Yam is a left-wing activist, not a journalist. NBC News’s racial news sections, such as NBC BLK, are sections for activists, where nothing matters except the liberal politics around race and skin color. The fact that a few twisted people decide to attack Asian Americans doesn’t mean China’s genocidal regime should be immune from criticism from Ryan or anybody else, even if a few activists want to complain about it to someone at NBC with a sympathetic ear and a diminished conscience.
