Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has branded four more Chinese state-run media outlets as foreign missions, a decision that subjects the employees to the scrutiny and restrictions applied to diplomats and undercover intelligence officers.
“The decision to designate these entities is not based on any content produced by these entities, nor does it place any restrictions on what the designated entities may publish in the United States,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said Monday. “It simply recognizes them for what they are.”
The new announcement applies to China Central Television, China News Service, the People’s Daily, and the Global Times. That foursome joins a list of five other state-run media organizations that Pompeo denounced as foreign missions in February, in a sign of how the State Department believes that the U.S.-China rivalry has acquired an ideological character.
“I would want to stress here that the Communist Party does not just exercise operational control over these propaganda entities, but it has full editorial control over their content,” Assistant Secretary David Stilwell told reporters in explaining the decision.
The previous round of foreign missions designations resulted in a retaliatory move from Beijing, which stripped the credentials of journalists from four major U.S. private media outlets, as well as the government-backed Voice of America.
“The Chinese government’s decision is particularly regrettable because it comes in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis when clear and reliable information about the international response to COVID-19 is essential,” Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron, who leads one of the targeted outlets, responded at the time.
Embassies and other foreign missions are traditional headquarters for spies as well as diplomats, however, and Pompeo’s team implied that the decision to treat the state-run media outlets as foreign missions could pay national security or counterintelligence dividends.
“These people are doing more than just propaganda, right?” Stilwell said. “And to understand exactly what that is, we have to know who they are. It’s about understanding what’s going on inside your own country.”
He acknowledged the costs of losing U.S. media access to China, but he also argued against regarding any new expulsions as acts of retaliation that might otherwise have been avoided.
“They’re going to take advantage of this thing as an excuse to prevent bad news from leaving its borders,” Stilwell said. “The best possible example that is how the world is suffering to a pandemic right now because we were kept in the dark as to how serious this thing was.”
