Brian Thomas: ‘Breaking the News’ Explains How China Underwrites Unprofitable Media Companies

Breaking the News
Gage Skidmore/Flickr, BNN

Talk radio host Brian Thomas commended Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow for revealing how unprofitable left-wing news media outlets are financially sustained by conglomerates dependent on business in China in Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

Thomas interviewed Marlow about Breaking the News on Monday’s edition of his eponymous radio program on 55KRC.

Increasing corruption across news media undermines the industry’s profitability as public awareness of its political corruption grows, Thomas noted. He also highlighted the news media’s deception through omission.

I listen to the mainstream media,” he said. “I hear the bias. Everybody who pays attention, knows, and understands can hear the bias. The silence in certain areas is deafening. The obvious spin on other topics they report on is very clear. So we know it. We see it.”

Thomas noted how many news media outlets are subsidiaries of broader international conglomerates with deep financial ties to the Chinese market and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Such news media companies’ integration into multilayered businesses allows them to lose money while remaining part of a broader profitable whole.

He remarked:

[Mainstream media] seem to be digging their own grave because what they’re pushing, ultimately, is this socialist/communist sort of dictatorial style government. That means no ad revenue if there aren’t free enterprise and free businesses and dollars to purchase advertising. 

I can see people turning their backs on this and going elsewhere where they’re advertising. That means they’re not going to be a going concern. But what you’re saying is they’re making so much money off the Chinese that they don’t need the ad revenue.

Marlow replied, “The newsrooms don’t need to make money. The newsrooms are there to protect corporate interests.” On Sunday, he elaborated on the news media conflicts of interest related to China and the CCP in an article titled, “How Pro-China Corporate Media and Left-Wing Activists Gutted Reporting on the Wuhan Coronavirus.”

Marlow explained, “You don’t need to make money from NBC News or ABC News because Disney [or Universal] is going to do all that for you. … All you need to do is make sure that no nosy journalists are mucking up your relationship with China, your international businesses, or making sure the entertainment media doesn’t make a huge level of profit that offsets any sort of losses that might come from the newsroom. So there’s no obligation for them to make money.”

Beyond the CCP, unprofitable news media outlets are propped up by billionaire leftist financiers. As illustrations of this trend, Marlow highlighted Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, and Laurene Powell Jobs — the widow of Steve Jobs — who owns the Atlantic while financially supporting Axios, Mother Jones, NowThis, and ProPublica.

“It’s an influence and information play,” Marlow said of billionaire financiers of left-wing news media outlets. “They want to make sure that no journalists are investigating their financial ties and perhaps they’re gathering more information they can use for their own portfolios. It’s dark, but it’s serious.”

Thomas praised Marlow’s inclusion of 1,200 endnotes across 105 pages in Breaking the News.

“Alex, thank you, on behalf of the lawyers out there like me, and I call myself a recovering lawyer,” Thomas stated. “I love having the citations, the footnotes, the bibliography, the source of information. You say something, you got a little note there, you know exactly where you got it, you can check the original source. That is a wonderful feature in that book.”

The Brian Thomas Show, which broadcasts live on AM station 55KRC in Cincinnati from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern, is available any time nationwide via iHeartRADIO.

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