Since August 2024, the New York Times has published a series of articles on the Shen Yun dance company, founded by people who practice Falun Gong, and on Falun Gong itself. The articles falsely portray Shen Yun as an abusive environment that treats performers as “expendable” while others benefit financially and Falun Gong practitioners as hoodwinked zealots.
The paper’s portrayals are unrecognizable not only to current and former Shen Yun performers and most Falun Gong practitioners, but also to doctors, lawyers, and China specialists closely familiar with these communities.
To understand how such distortions came to appear in such a prominent American newspaper, the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC) researched various aspects of the reporting. Drawing on interviews with over 100 current and former Shen Yun performers over the past year, email communications between the journalists and interview subjects, medical doctors who regularly treat Shen Yun performers, along with leaked Chinese government information, we have identified multiple dubious elements.
We discovered that the Times disregarded repeated and good-faith attempts by Shen Yun and others to provide information that ran counter to its preconceived narrative, used highly problematic sources and a small sample size to build a particular storyline, ignored a wide-range of experts, did not disclose critical information to readers, and continued a decades-long pattern of grossly distorting the beliefs of Falun Gong practitioners.
The findings raise serious concerns about why the Times would engage in reporting that breaches journalistic ethics, while obviously harming a religious minority that is persecuted in China. The extent to which the Times’ reporting achieves the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is deeply disturbing.
Below, we detail 12 things readers should know about the Times’ coverage.
Read Report:https://faluninfo.net/key-things-to-know-about-the-new-york-times-investigation-of-shen-yun-falun-gong
Our Latest Research:https://faluninfo.net/latest-research
