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Old 03-29-2021 | 12:54 PM
  #38  
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oldmako
Gets Weekends Off
 
Joined: May 2009
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From: The GF of FUPM
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The Epoch Times? You'll excuse me if I don't read the article. The Wiki read, however, was pretty entertaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times


"​​​​​​The Epoch Times is a far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement. The newspaper, based in New York City, is part of the Epoch Media Group, which also operates New Tang Dynasty Television.

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The Epoch Times opposes the Chinese Communist Party,[20] promotes far-right politicians in Europe,[3][5] and has backed President Donald Trump in the U.S.;[21] a 2019 report by NBC News showed it to be the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign.[18][22][23] The Epoch Media Group's news sites and YouTube channels have spread conspiracy theories such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation.[18][24][25] In 2020, the New York Times called it a "global-scale misinformation machine".[21]The Epoch Times frequently promotes other Falun Gong affiliated groups, such as the performing arts company Shen Yun "


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And this from the failing NYT...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/t...​​

How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine

Since 2016, the Falun Gong-backed newspaper has used aggressive Facebook tactics and right-wing misinformation to create an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire

For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.

The changes also paved the way for the publication, which is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscureChinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.

First, it embraced President Trump, treating him as an ally in Falun Gong’s scorched-earth fight against China’s ruling Communist Party, which banned the group two decades ago and has persecuted its members ever since. Its relatively staid coverage of U.S. politics became more partisan, with more articles explicitly supporting Mr. Trump and criticizing his opponents.

Around the same time, The Epoch Times bet big on another powerful American institution: Facebook. The publication and its affiliates employed a novel strategy that involved creating dozens of Facebook pages, filling them with feel-good videos and viral clickbait, and using them to sell subscriptions and drive traffic back to its partisan news coverage.
In an April 2017 email to the staff obtained by The New York Times, the paper’s leadership envisioned that the Facebook strategy could help turn The Epoch Times into “the world’s largest and most authoritative media.” It could also introduce millions of people to the teachings of Falun Gong, fulfilling the group’s mission of “saving sentient beings.”

Today, The Epoch Times and its affiliates are a force in right-wing media, with tens of millions of social media followers spread across dozens of pages and an online audience that rivals those of The Daily Caller and Breitbart News, and with a similar willingness to feed the online fever swamps of the far right.

It also has growing influence in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. The president and his family have shared articles from the paper on social media, and Trump administration officials have sat for interviews with its reporters. In August, a reporter from The Epoch Times asked a question at a White House press briefing.

It is a remarkable success story for Falun Gong, which has long struggled to establish its bona fides against Beijing’s efforts to demonize it as an “evil cult,” partly because its strident accounts of persecution in China can sometimes be difficult to substantiate or veer into exaggeration. In 2006, an Epoch Times reporter disrupted a White House visit by the Chinese president by shouting, “Evil people will die early.”

Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist and a former chairman of Breitbart, said in an interview in July that The Epoch Times’s fast growth had impressed him.

“They’ll be the top conservative news site in two years,” said Mr. Bannon, who was arrested on fraud charges in August. “They punch way above their weight, they have the readers, and they’re going to be a force to be reckoned with.”
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