Wave of Hit Pieces Reveals Why Establishment Is Terrified of This Defiant Newspaper

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Shutterstock, Freepik

Not that long ago, it was safe for the press to say a few good things about The Epoch Times.

In 2010, for example, Politico presented the publication as a quirky fixture of life in New York City.

Its article ended with a convenience store owner who carried the paper comparing it to The New York Times—a living symbol of America’s liberal establishment, the periodical that Washington insider McGeorge Bundy supposedly described as the city’s “interoffice memo system.”

But attitudes changed with the rise of Donald J. Trump.

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Even before his election in November 2016, the NY Times’ Jim Rutenberg suggested that Mr. Trump, the brash political outsider, was “testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.” In 2018, the CBC wrote that the president made journalists “more apt to blend opinion with facts.”

In 2021, a writer for Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, a key node for emerging elites in the legacy media, predicted that objectivity in journalism would be replaced by a new value: “solidarity,” a term that, though not necessarily leftist in practice, draws on 100-plus years of mostly leftist discourse. Explaining what she characterized as the shortcomings of conventional journalistic objectivity, she referenced a Twitter (now known as X) post that characterized the president as a “driver” of misinformation and disinformation.

In short, the media declared war on President Trump.

But The Epoch Times continued to strive for objectivity in its news reporting. That meant reporting on President Trump without bias or prejudice—treating him fairly like any other president and not like public enemy No. 1.

Epoch Times Reporter Roman Balmakov in New York on April 19, 2023. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Readers seeking truth and tradition flocked to the publication.

All of a sudden, the anti-communist newspaper founded by Chinese dissidents didn’t seem so cute and harmless anymore. Media outlets that treated their establishment counterparts as gentlemanly rivals lined up to take aim at a fast-rising competitor—in some cases, just before the 2020 presidential election.

Slowly and then all at once, the hit pieces against The Epoch Times came in—from NBC News, the NY Times, The Atlantic, and others.

Yet their attacks may have revealed more than they bargained for. Each one had to acknowledge The Epoch Times’ growing importance.

Hit Pieces Highlight Power, Reach, Growth

Take NBC News’ 2019 article on The Epoch Times, for example, which stated that the publication “wields one of the biggest social media followings of any news outlet.”

The piece stated that The Epoch Times and its sister media outlet, NTD, “combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher, according to data from the social media analytics company Tubular.”

The New York Times described The Epoch Times as “one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers” in an article originally published in late October 2020. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The New York Times made similar points in an article originally published in late October 2020, just days before the presidential election.

The very first paragraph described The Epoch Times as “one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.”

Like NBC, the NY Times elaborated on the publication’s social media success, noting that it had “tens of millions of social media followers spread across dozens of pages.”

Incidentally, Nieman Lab, the aforementioned credentialing hub for legacy media, lauded the New York Times article and described The Epoch Times as “the culmination of all that Facebook has encouraged.”

The next big hit piece came just a few months later. It was published by The Atlantic in January 2021, shortly after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Years before various legal arguments against President Trump hinged on the use of the word “insurrection” and, more specifically, the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, the article’s subtitle cast The Epoch Times as “a pro-Trump propaganda machine in an age of plague and insurrection.”

An October 2023 article on NBC News characterized The Epoch Times as “one of the country’s most successful and influential conservative news organizations.” Shaun Heasley/Getty Images

Yet it, too, acknowledged the publication’s popularity, which, by some measures, had surpassed that of many legacy media outlets.

“The Epoch Times can currently claim the most popular Apple newspaper app in the country (The New York Times is No. 2),” author Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote.

Another legacy media broadside came more than two years later, again from NBC News.

An October 2023 article by Brandy Zadrozny characterized The Epoch Times as “one of the country’s most successful and influential conservative news organizations.”

(L–R) Epoch Times National Editor Ivan Pentchoukov, “Facts Matter” host Roman Balmakov, Life and Tradition and Travel Editor Channaly Philipp, Editor-in-Chief Jasper Fakkert, and “American Thought Leaders” host Jan Jekielek pose for a group photo in New York on May 24, 2023. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Its headline conceded that the paper had gone “mainstream.”

“The media organization,” Ms. Zadrozny wrote, “is expanding.” She cited its new office in Southern California, which the organization had written about the previous month.

‘Let’s Grow This to Number One’

The signs of the publication’s continued growth aren’t just coming from skeptical or outright hostile media sources. At The Epoch Times’ holiday party in Dec. 2023, Editor-in-Chief Jasper Fakkert noted that digital and print subscriptions to The Epoch Times now make it the fourth-largest U.S. newspaper.

“Let’s grow this to number one. Thank you,” Jan Jekielek, senior editor and host of EpochTV program “American Thought Leaders,” said in his remarks at that same party.

If the past few years are any guide to the future, The Epoch Times is on the path to further success, with or without the permission of the establishment.

But it’s all thanks to the readers and viewers. Without an audience hungry for truth, tradition, and hope, legacy media gatekeepers would have nothing to fear, and nothing to attack.