Chinese-language news sites targeted by analysts conceal ownership structures

Three of Australia’s most-trafficked Chinese-language news websites fail to disclose their ownership and financing structures, according to news rating group NewsGuard, and one was found to have ties to the Chinese government.

The three websites were rated ahead of NewsGuard’s launch in Australia and New Zealand in March and included The Australian Chinese Daily, which scored the highest rating of the three, as well as ChineseNews.net.au, and sydneytoday.com, both of which scored poor “nutrition labels” that prompt readers to “proceed with caution”.

On a call with reporters last week, NewsGuard senior analyst Macrina Wang characterised SydneyToday as the most “egregious” of the three. It targets readers from the Chinese diaspora in Australia and New Zealand, specifically Sydney, and was found by NewsGuard analysts to have advanced several false and misleading claims. Among them were that the 2022 massacre of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, was staged, and that COVID-19 was engineered in a US lab.

“But what we’re finding is that these claims were surfacing on the site because [SydneyToday] were republishing from state media — not necessarily because they weren’t producing these articles with their reporters and producing original articles. It’s just that they were finding and using state media as credible sources,” Wang said.  

SydneyToday’s nutrition label, which readers can view with a NewsGuard subscription, shows the site scores points in only three of nine marking criteria.

Sites are graded on their propensity to publish false content or whether they gather and present information responsibly, as well as how transparent they are in labelling advertising, and whether or not they disclose their ownership and financing structures.

The site’s ownership, Media Today Group Pty Ltd, is only disclosed as part of a copyright notice at the bottom of the page, which falls short of NewsGuard’s transparency benchmark and fails to disclose links between the site’s co-founder Chen Ming and the Chinese government. (Disclosure: Crikey was also found to have fallen short of NewsGuard’s ownership disclosure benchmark.)

Chen’s links to Beijing were first reported by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in a 2020 policy brief, which found that he was, until late 2018, listed as a co-vice-president of the group Australian Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China. The group supports the reunification of Taiwan and mainland China. In February NewsGuard analysts found Chen was relisted as a former co-vice-president.

While the other two sites researched by analysts did not present links to the Chinese government, their ownership and financing structures were just as murky.

In the case of ChineseNews.net.au, ownership isn’t detailed anywhere on the site, and NewsGuard analysts were unable to determine its owner, only the domain name registrar Don Wang, according to the site’s nutrition label.

Most of the articles that surfaced on the site are republished from other sources, NewsGuard found, including Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, and the Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

The Australian Chinese Daily, which also publishes a daily print newspaper and a weekly magazine, was founded in 1987 by Sandra Lau but doesn’t disclose its ownership or editorial leadership on its website.

Some articles carry a byline with an author’s initials, while others are bylined with more generic author profiles such as “By Australian News (CZ)” or “By Australian News (Δ)”. NewsGuard analysts tried to contact the newspaper three times as part of its review in February but claim they didn’t hear back.

The site did, however, score the highest credibility rating of the three websites, losing points only for the absence of a corrections policy, concealing its ownership and leadership, and not providing names, contact details or biographical information for the authors regularly published on its site.

Articles were found by NewsGuard analysts to be “fact-based” and “well-sourced”, often depending on statements made by elected and public health officials, as well as referring to reporting carried out by credible news outlets such as the ABC and Reuters. It was also found to draw a responsible line between news and opinion.