Dozens of reporters took a cue from NBC and granted a free pass to a tech magnate who is evidently reluctant to voice views of which Beijing would disapprove.
A recent dustup on Capitol Hill is a Rorschach test that shows the misplaced priorities of some in media who rushed to smear Tom Cotton as racist at the expense of holding accountable a scandal-plagued tech giant.
During an exchange with the senator at a hearing yesterday, TikTok CEO Shou Chew repeatedly declined to acknowledge that China is carrying out a campaign to imprison, enslave, and forcibly sterilize ethnic-minority Uyghurs, which according to the U.S. government amounts to genocide and crimes against humanity.
Chew’s dodges were noticeable, and Cotton was right over the target. During another hearing last March, Chew notably dodged the same question multiple times. In December of 2022, his top lobbyist embarrassingly flubbed an interview with Jake Tapper, in which the CNN host pressed him on the matter.
Here’s why this pattern matters, and why lawmakers and leading broadcast journalists keep asking TikTok execs about these abuses. TikTok and its parent ByteDance have extensive ties to the Uyghur genocide. ByteDance signed contracts with Chinese Communist Party propaganda and law-enforcement arms to promote Beijing’s propaganda on the situation, and it has partnerships with Chinese military companies directly involved in the abuses.
These are a few indications, among several others, that ByteDance is beholden to Beijing. Not to mention, Chew was ByteDance’s CFO before he took the top job at TikTok.
But instead of highlighting the cagey stance of a multibillion-dollar Chinese tech behemoth toward ongoing mass atrocities, NBC News saw an opportunity.
It clipped one minute of the full eight-minute exchange in which Cotton asked several questions of Chew, who is a citizen of Singapore, about his nationality and if he has any allegiances to the Chinese Communist Party. Though the clip doesn’t include Chew’s answers on the Uyghur genocide, it does include his acknowledgement that there was a massacre at Tiananmen Square.
The implication of the clip that NBC posted to its account on X was simple: that Cotton had asked a series of racist questions and can’t distinguish between different Asian nationalities.
At the time of writing, the NBC tweet had 29 million views, and it has been embedded into articles from outlets such as NPR that ran with the McCarthyism framing. Few of these articles note, even in passing, Chew’s Uyghur-genocide dodges. None of them features those answers prominently.
The coverage also mostly omits the two-minute exchange that immediately preceded Cotton’s questioning about Chew’s nationality.
During that portion of the questioning, Cotton asked Chew about ByteDance’s well-documented ties to the Chinese Communist Party, through the company’s internal CCP committee dedicated to advancing the party’s ideology, and through the Chinese government’s partial ownership of ByteDance’s China-focused subsidiary.
He also pressed Chew about his tenure as CFO of Xiaomi, the Chinese mobile-phone company that the Trump administration slapped with sanctions for acting as a “Chinese Communist military company,” in part because its founder received an award from the Chinese government ministry that oversees military-civil fusion programs. (After Xiaomi won an injunction in court, the Pentagon dropped the matter, though the company has failed to dispel concerns that its products come preloaded with software that censors phrases inconvenient to Beijing.)
Chew explained that he lived in Beijing for five years during his time at the company. Even during the now-notorious questioning that immediately followed, Cotton never expressed the view that Chew is Chinese. He merely asked if Chew additionally sought Chinese citizenship while he was at Xiaomi — a move that could have boosted his career.
Just as important, he raised the fact that Chew’s company is very transparently aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. That’s the main problem with the “racism” framing: A person can align himself with the Chinese Communist Party while holding a different country’s citizenship. Cotton could have asked these questions of an American in Chew’s role, and he has taken a similarly tough line toward U.S. executives who take Beijing’s preferred positions.
But thanks to the framing provided by NBC and others, millions of Americans have been led to believe that it’s somehow unfair to ask if the former CFO of a company that hosts an internal CCP committee is himself aligned with the party.
Chew and his company deserve more scrutiny: ByteDance has spied on American journalists’ locations, maintained blacklists barring China’s opponents from its platforms, and censored Beijing’s critics. But dozens of reporters took a cue from a social-media editor at NBC and granted a free pass to a tech magnate who is evidently reluctant to voice views of which Beijing would disapprove.