The network similarly gave the CCP a pass for human rights abuses in its coverage of the 2022 Olympics.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at NBC’s fawning over an Olympic skier who represents China, and cover more media misses.
NBC Gives Eileen Gu a Pass
With all the praise NBC has lavished on Olympic skier Eileen Gu throughout its coverage of the Milan–Cortina Games, you would think she was an American sports hero.
And perhaps she could have been, had she not accepted millions of dollars to turn her back on the country in which she was born, raised, and trained to instead compete for the Chinese Communist Party on the international stage.
Gu was recently invited onto NBC’s Today, where anchors gushed over the Stanford University student despite her decision to represent the regime that is not only responsible for human rights atrocities against the Uyghur minority, but also for the sentencing of pro-democracy Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison last week on trumped-up national security charges. Lai is the 78-year-old founder of the newspaper Apple Daily, which championed the cause of freedom for Hong Kong.
As NR’s Rich Lowry recently wrote, choosing to compete for the People’s Republic of China in the modern era “is a little like deciding to represent a fascist country during the 1930s.”
New Wall Street Journal reporting suggests Gu has been well-paid to turn a blind eye to the country’s crimes to represent the CCP. The Bay Area native, along with figure skater Zhu Yi, another U.S.-born athlete who competes for China, received a combined $6.6 million from the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau last year, according to the report. The public budget that accidentally revealed the athletes’ names “didn’t break down their individual payments, though it’s likely that Gu, a three-time Olympic medalist, received a larger share of the funding,” the report said. The budget indicated the sports bureau was set to pay the two athletes a combined $14 million over the past three years.
And yet, NBC’s co-hosts treated Gu like an all-American girl.
Craig Melvin introduced the silver medalist as “American-born Eileen Gu, who competes for her mother’s home country, China.”
Dylan Dreyer and Al Roker asked Gu softball questions about how she felt on her silver medal–winning run and how she would be preparing for the freestyle skiing competition.
As the five-minute-long interview went on, Melvin explained that he had previously met Gu at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing when she won “two gold, one silver.” He also said she had “graced the cover of Vogue, Time, you’ve been a runway model,” scored “dozens of endorsement deals as well,” and “almost had a perfect score on the SAT as well.”
Gu went on to talk about her life as a student at Stanford and how she is working to “explore the intersection of femininity and power of self-expression” in fashion.
“Eileen, you are such a delight,” Dreyer said in closing. “Thank you so much for joining us this morning. I don’t know how you’re gonna pack up to eventually go home at some point, but good luck in the rest of the game.”
“And — and Eileen, next time, can you, could you come out of your shell because — yeah, you’re just so laid back,” Roker joked in the segment that was first lambasted by conservative media watchdog Newsbusters.
As RealClearPolitics White House correspondent Philip Wegmann pointed out, the press is typically “obsessed with asking Olympians about American politics,” yet NBC failed to ask Gu to discuss the CCP’s politics, including its human rights abuses.
“A welcome change could be asking Eileen Gu, the US skier competing for the CCP, about China giving Jimmy Lai a death sentence,” Wegmann said.
The interview was reminiscent of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, where much of the media gave Gu a warm reception — she won an ESPY and was dubbed one of Time’s most influential people.
NBC broadcasters drew attention to Chinese human rights abuses during the 2022 Olympics opening ceremony — but took a both-sides approach. They cast the Uyghur genocide and other atrocities as the subject of “allegations” leveled by the U.S. rather than as well-established facts.
During a discussion with broadcaster Mike Tirico and two China experts NBC tapped to help lead its political coverage of the Olympics, Savannah Guthrie noted that “some have said there’s a cloud over these Olympics, that China has come under fire globally because of policies and practices.”
She noted at the time that the U.S. was undertaking a diplomatic boycott of the Games because of human rights, “in particular China’s treatment of the minority Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region,” which she said the U.S. “has come right out” and labeled a “genocide.”
Journalist Andy Browne, one of NBC’s China experts, called it “the most sensitive issue” of the Olympics and said only that Western governments and human rights groups “allege” that the Chinese government is engaged in the systematic repression of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
“They allege that this is a massive program of social engineering aimed at suppressing Muslim Uyghur culture, language, tradition, identity,” he added. “They allege a host of human rights abuses, forced labor, coercive birth control practices, indoctrination and that all this adds up to a form of cultural genocide.”
“It has to be said that the Chinese government emphatically denies all of this. They say that accusations of genocide are the lie of the century,” he concluded.
Browne’s presentation of China’s denial prompted Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin to criticize NBC for taking a “both-sides” approach to human rights abuses.
Headline Fail of the Week
It must’ve been a slow news week at Rolling Stone. The outlet published an article inviting readers to “Meet the American Girl Doll Influencers Protesting ICE.”
“Some may find it surprising, but for those creating the content, it makes perfect sense: ‘We’ve been radicalized since the Nineties!’” a subheading reads.
“Kirsten will be happy when ICE gets the f*** out of Minnesota,” read one Instagram post mentioned in the article.
“Consider me hooked,” writes the article’s author, independent features writer Lorena O’Neil.
Media Misses
• NPR Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep recently compared the clothing of a masked suspect who was seen on video at Nancy Guthrie’s house on the day of her abduction to that of a federal immigration agent. “So, let me think about this: we have this man. He walks up to the porch, he’s armed, and his face is covered, a little like a federal immigration agent — although it’s more covered even than that,” Inskeep said. “He’s wearing gloves, his head’s down, other times head up, something in the mouth, looks like a flashlight in the mouth, walks up to the security camera. That’s what I see.”
• Martha Stewart recently said she is “feeling a little bit down” about President Trump’s immigration raids. “I’m not happy with what’s going on with immigration,” she told USA Today. “We got a notice in my town of Bedford, N.Y., that ICE was in the schools. That’s extremely depressing. And this is a beautiful suburban town, an hour from New York City. It’s crazy. ‘Big Brother’ watching is not an easy way to live,” she added.
“I’m not going to get terribly political and criticize anybody individually,” she added. “America’s a beautiful place, and we have had such a beautiful life here, and we have to continue to have that.”
• New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin painted the resignation of a CBS Evening News producer as major news last week after the producer, Alicia Hastey, told her colleagues in a memo that she took a buyout offer due to a “shifting set of ideological expectations” at the network. “There has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism,” she wrote in the memo obtained by Mullin.
She goes on to say, “Walter Cronkite once said in a response to critics: ‘If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism — that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.’”
“Cronkite’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered,” she added.
NEW: “CBS Evening News” producer Alicia Hastey sends a bombshell farewell note:
Stories are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.” pic.twitter.com/4orZmbkqRI
— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) February 12, 2026