An MS Now reporter who criticized President Trump’s speech about Chinese influence previously traveled to the country with the help of a Chinese Communist Party-linked organization and failed to tell readers he was the guest of a CCP-linked outfit.

David Rohde, MS NOW’s senior national security reporter, who traveled to China when he was with Reuters, was listed as one of many mainstream journalists who traveled to China as part of Chinese influence operations, as revealed by journalist Natalie Winters, who co-hosts the War Room podcast and video stream with Steve Bannon.

Rohde himself announced he was taking the trip back in 2011 in a column titled, “Will ‘Made in America’ sell in China?” In the column, which no longer bears his name but did in a previous archived version visited by Just the News on Tuesday, Rohde says that he and other journalists “are visiting China this week on a trip organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a non-profit group run by businessmen with close ties to the Chinese government.”

Paid for a viewpoint?

Since that visit, Rohde has written numerous columns favorable to China, including one shortly after Trump’s speech claiming the president was trying to “undermine trust in the midterm elections by claiming that China had a role in his losing the presidency in 2020.”

During Trump’s speech earlier this month, the president alleged that China attempted to allegedly influence American public opinion by offering money to journalists to write negative stories about him.

“The Chinese government sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him,” Trump said during his speech.

While Just the News could not find evidence of such a clear monetary exchange, journalists like Rohde, who were hosted in China, did have their trip organized and paid for by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), whose founder, Tung Chee-hwa, is a Hong Kong businessman who served as vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) from 2005 to 2023. 

The CPPCC is a top advisory body within China’s government. In a 2018 report from the U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission, CPPCC was described as “a critical coordinating body that brings together representatives of China’s other interest groups and is led by a member of China’s highest-level decision-making authority.”

Ethical concerns for journalism

Most news organizations focused on reporters' ethics eschew hiding the fact that the reporter's trip was paid for by the subject he or she is covering. For example, the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Conduct explicitly states that journalists should "Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility." 

Another commentator on journalistic ethics, Zan Romanoff, put it more bluntly: "In theory, journalistic ethics are simple: writers shouldn’t pay for access to subjects or sources, or be paid by those subjects and sources to write about them; outlays should be provided by the publication, and limited to the bare-bone requirements of reporting, such as food."

CUSEF is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law designed to make foreign influence transparent. The CPPCC is part of China’s “United Front” work, a Soviet-era strategy used to influence Chinese communities overseas, foreign governments, and others to support the policies preferred by Beijing.

Part of that effort includes bringing Western journalists to China. Rohde in particular has written positively about China – and negatively about Trump – since his trip in 2011. In his 2011 column for Reuters, Rohde derided America while praising China.

“Unlike the United States where free-market advocates deride the role of government, the Chinese state has played a central role in creating, supporting and expanding businesses here. In addition to privatization, cheap government loans and massive government-funded infrastructure projects drove China’s boom. The Chinese government also required foreign companies to create joint ventures with Chinese firms that, fairly or unfairly, allowed local companies to learn valuable manufacturing and business practices,” Rohde wrote.

Rohde declined to independently confirm to Just the News that he dd or did not attend a CUSEF-sponsored trip to China.