NBC News helped spread Chinese Communist Party propaganda in its coverage of the Beijing Olympics on Friday, including one reporter who reduced the Chinese government’s genocide of Uyghur minorities to “human rights issues.”
“It’s worth remembering that while Western countries may be boycotting these Olympics over human rights issues, China styles itself as a champion of the developing world and it has plenty of support in countries from Africa to Latin America where its investments have [built] up local economies,” one NBC News reporter said.
Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist and CNN political analyst, tweeted that NBC News also stated that western nations “allege…a systematic repression of Muslim Uyghurs.”
“@NBCNews both-sides approach to the Uyghur genocide: ‘Western governments… allege… a systematic repression of Muslim Uyghurs,’” Rogin tweeted, quoting NBC. “‘It has to be said that the Chinese government emphatically denies all of this. They say that accusations of genocide are the lie of the century.’”
In a separate tweet, Rogin noted China’s shocking choice to include the very “minority groups it is oppressing” in the Olympics’ opening ceremonies as NBC continues its misleading coverage of the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses.
“As China parades out minority groups it is oppressing, @NBC continues presenting it (misleadingly) as just a US concern: ‘The Biden administration cited ongoing human rights abuses by the Chinese government against the Uyghurs… as the reason for the diplomatic boycott,'” Rogin tweeted.
According to the New York Times, China closed out the opening ceremonies with two athletes – including one who is reportedly of Uyghur heritage – carrying the torch to the Olympic cauldron as the official start to the Games.
Last June, witnesses to and experts on China’s egregious human rights abuses spoke at a tribunal in London on China’s treatment of its ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.
The testimony included indiscriminate killings, torture, rape, enslavement, forced separation of children from their parents, forced sterilization, labor, enforced disappearances, destruction of cultural and religious heritage, persecution, forced marriages, and the imposition of Han Chinese men into Uyghur households.
Earlier this week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) slammed NBC for profiting off the “genocidal” Chinese Communist Party’s Olympics.
“The concern we have—right?—is that, you know, NBC is putting up a bunch of subscription services that people have to pay for to watch some of these things in real-time…I don’t think they should be making a penny out of this, or, at least, consumers don’t have to participate in helping them make a penny out of it,” Rubio told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday.
“The core of this is very simple and that is—if we want—we shouldn’t allow people to monetize an Olympics being hosted by a genocidal, communist government that—by the way—is also trying to dismantle the U.S.’s place in the world—targeting our industries, our jobs, supply chains all across the board,” he added.
