Steve Klett was so glad to have landed a job as a reporter at an up-and-coming newspaper in New York that he stuck with it even after his managers made him watch a disturbing video about the torture of a religious group in China.
Another reporter at the publication, The Epoch Times, found it odd that when she joined in 2022, her supervisor directed her to sit at her desk and read two 300-page books about the evils of communism.
But one of the strangest things about the workplace, former employees said, was its apparent obsession with a touring dance group called Shen Yun.
When Shen Yun was performing in town, employees were regularly given free tickets. Reporters were sent to cover the show and often huddled afterward in hotel rooms near the venue, working all night to publish stories. One former reporter recalled colleagues taking quick naps on the floor.
Alongside its regular news coverage, The Epoch Times has published more than 17,000 articles about Shen Yun since 2009 — most of them full of glowing testimonials from audience members, with headlines describing the show as “heavenly,” “incredibly touching,” “flawless” and “the most disciplined performance of any kind.”
The fawning coverage was not a product of quirky editorial judgment or an unusual commitment to chronicling the arts. Rather, it was part of a deliberate strategy to promote Shen Yun — a huge moneymaker for the Falun Gong religious movement — while relentlessly attacking its critics, records and interviews show.
The strategy has emanated from the edicts of Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, whose followers run The Epoch Times and who oversees Shen Yun from his movement’s guarded headquarters northwest of New York City.
Mr. Li, now in his early 70s, has said that Shen Yun is the most important project in his religion. He has urged followers to persuade as many people as possible to see Shen Yun shows, which he says can spread Falun Gong’s message and save audiences from a coming apocalypse.
But he has also presided over a dance group that former performers say has discouraged them from seeking medical care and subjected them to years of emotional abuse.
The Epoch Times has long been known to have ties to Falun Gong. It rose to national prominence after 2016 by promoting right-wing conspiracy theories and the policies of Donald J. Trump. Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s pick for F.B.I. director in his second administration, had a show on the outlet’s streaming site, EpochTV, where he conducted an interview with Mr. Trump in 2022.
But the outsize influence that Mr. Li and his movement have exerted on the outlet’s coverage decisions — especially as they relate to a dance group, Shen Yun, that brings in tens of millions of dollars for the movement every year — has not been previously reported.
The movement has taken pains to play down that influence, especially after The Epoch Times’s chief financial officer was arrested in June on money laundering conspiracy charges.
In a speech to his followers in Manhattan in 2010, Mr. Li described the importance of The Epoch Times being seen as “regular media in ordinary society.” He has said that this would maximize the outlet’s ability to spread Falun Gong’s worldview while also offering more conventional coverage for mainstream readers.
The Epoch Times has said that its founding mission was to expose human rights abuses in China, including against Falun Gong practitioners. The Chinese government has banned Falun Gong and persecuted its practitioners worldwide for nearly three decades.
Responding to a request for comment, a representative for the news outlet, Samuel Zhou, said in a statement that The New York Times was intending to report “multiple false claims,” without detailing what they were.
“The Epoch Times as an organization is committed to supporting truth and tradition,” the statement said. “In that vein, The Epoch Times has proudly and transparently supported traditional culture by sponsoring Shen Yun.”
Mr. Zhou added that the publication is “editorially independent.”
But for many employees at The Epoch Times, it was clear that the outlet was serving the interests of Falun Gong and Mr. Li, according to internal communications and interviews with more than two dozen people familiar with the publisher’s operations, including former employees who worked in the United States, Britain, Taiwan and Australia.
“At all times, they tried to avoid any sort of, ‘We’re run by Falun Gong,’” said Jaya Gibson, the publication’s former global marketing director, who left in 2012. “I said, why don’t we just be honest about what our agenda is?”
Articles about Shen Yun had to be reviewed by approved staff members before publication. Reviewers were instructed to protect Shen Yun’s image and to remove anything from articles that could “diminish or damage Shen Yun,” according to internal documents obtained by The Times. The documents instructed reviewers to remove language comparing Shen Yun to ballet, saying: “Shen Yun is saving people. Gods are dancing onstage. No comparison.”
As the dance group’s world tour began again last week, The Epoch Times has published articles saying that tickets had sold out in Leipzig, Germany, and that the mayor of Austin, Texas, had declared Dec. 26 “Shen Yun Day.”
And the outlet regularly has run stories that attacked perceived enemies of the dance group, often by insinuating that they are agents of the Chinese government.
Those supposed enemies have included a Chinese YouTuber in Japan who questioned Shen Yun’s practices; neighbors of Shen Yun’s compound in Orange County, N.Y., who accused it of polluting the environment; a U.S. customs officer who stopped a Shen Yun dancer at a Chicago airport; a former dancer who filed a forced-labor lawsuit against Shen Yun last month; and The Times, which in August published an investigation of the group’s treatment of its performers.
Many Epoch Times journalists cover mainstream beats like economics and sports, and some former reporters told The Times that they believed their coverage was impartial and uninfluenced by Falun Gong’s worldview. They said that working at The Epoch Times had given them valuable journalism training.
But others felt they had been duped into joining a newsroom that turned out to feel more like a religious operation. Some felt pressured to adopt Falun Gong’s practices — a potential violation of state and federal employment laws.
In his statement, Mr. Zhou, the Epoch Times representative, said, “We welcome team members of all backgrounds and beliefs, and comply with all applicable laws and regulations.”
Mr. Li’s influence over The Epoch Times has extended beyond stories about Shen Yun.
Top journalists at The Epoch Times have said privately that Mr. Li directed the paper to ramp up its Trump coverage starting around 2016, according to former Falun Gong practitioners involved in the conversations. One current employee recalled editing out anything in articles that was critical of Mr. Trump, whose tough-on-China policies aligned with Falun Gong’s mission.
The news organization saw its revenue jump in the ensuing years, to more than $121 million in 2021, from $3.9 million in 2016. (Prosecutors have said that at least part of the increase stemmed from the proceeds of money laundering.)
When Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, The Epoch Times refused for months to acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner. Not long after, Mr. Li told workers at The Epoch Times and other Falun Gong media organizations that Mr. Trump “was forcibly removed through improper means,” according to a Chinese-language transcript of his speech, and called him a victim of “gods from the old universe.”
Later, Mr. Li influenced a marked shift in tone at the publication. In a meeting at his compound with the editor in chief of the U.S. editions of The Epoch Times, Jasper Fakkert, and other journalists in July 2023, he told them not to favor either political party, according to Simone Gao, a former Falun Gong media personality who participated in the meeting.
And this year, Mr. Li published a decree calling on practitioners not to attack important politicians on either side of the aisle. The edict came five days after federal prosecutors under the Biden administration announced charges against The Epoch Times’s chief financial officer.
After it was published, the editorial processes inside The Epoch Times changed instantly, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Some content was removed from the website, two of the people said. A new layer of editing was set up to strip articles of partisan language.
One former Epoch Times employee said her supervisor repeatedly told her and other colleagues to read Mr. Li’s article to understand the paper’s new editorial policies.
Relentless Promotion
For journalists who joined The Epoch Times without prior knowledge of Falun Gong, working there could be a disorienting experience, said 10 former newsroom employees, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation for discussing the outlet’s inner workings.
After Mr. Klett, the former reporter, joined in 2016, he was shown a demonstration of software being developed in the office to circumvent China’s internet censors.
“It was like a James Bond villain lair where there was a big map of China on a screen,” he said. “They were bragging: ‘We’re doing good things in the world, like this.’”
In the Southern California bureau, reporters would see the newsroom emptying at different points during the day as certain colleagues gathered elsewhere to meditate.
Former reporters said it was never explained to them why the Epoch Times homepage every day featured a yellow box with the latest decrees from Falun Gong’s founder.
And one former employee recalled that during Shen Yun’s annual world tour, some colleagues would disappear from their normal news duties to help with the show, including by working as stagehands carrying heavy equipment.
What was less widely known in the newsroom was how much pressure some of its journalists were facing to gather audience reactions at Shen Yun shows.
A subset of reporters — all Falun Gong practitioners — were instructed to show up at the venues and target “people with influence, credibility and high standing in society,” such as people in finance and the arts, internal training guides show. They were sometimes notified in advance of the seat numbers of prominent people.
Helena Zhu, a former reporter who worked in the New York office until 2012, said her first question to audience members was what they did for a living. If a person’s job did not fit into certain categories, she would thank them and find someone else.
“The whole purpose is to promote the show,” Ms. Zhu said. “It’s not for balanced reporting.”
An internal training guide from 2023 contained lengthy lists of sample questions for audience members, including “Did the performance awaken anything in you?” and “Did it answer any of life’s questions?”
Some former reporters also described having to meet article quotas after each performance. A former editor likened the pressure to “covering the Super Bowl.”
If audience members asked about the connection between The Epoch Times and Shen Yun, reporters were told to say that the publication considered the show to be the “significant cultural event of our time,” according to two people familiar with the matter.
‘This is not breaking news’
For the former staffers who spoke to The Times, there was little mystery as to why the paper was going to such lengths to promote Shen Yun.
Both the newspaper and the dance group support the spiritual mission of Mr. Li, who is known as “Master” to his followers and seen as the omniscient creator of the universe. Practitioners often refer to the paper as “our media.”
Mr. Li has said that people who believe in the goodness of Falun Gong, and reject the Chinese Communist Party, will be saved from a coming apocalypse and enter a new universe.
Some of the former reporters said they felt motivated by the idea that the reviews could save people if they prompted positive thoughts about Falun Gong.
“If you failed to get that article in time, you’d feel horrible about yourself,” said Ben Hurley, a reporter in Sydney until around 2009. “You would think, ‘We’ve failed to save people.’”
Ms. Gao, the longtime Falun Gong media personality, said the reviews were a spiritual imperative, not a journalistic one.
“Later on, I realized this is not breaking news,” said Ms. Gao, who helped The Epoch Times cover Shen Yun until around 2017. “You don’t have to work overtime, people not sleeping, to get these reviews out. But we all did that because Master Li wanted to see it immediately.”
After Ms. Gao publicly criticized the movement on social media last year, all of her articles were removed from the Epoch Times website. The same thing happened to the work of other reporters who left the outlet and spoke out against Falun Gong.
Behind the scenes, the newspaper’s coverage of Shen Yun has served the religious movement in other ways.
Ms. Zhu and another former Epoch Times reporter said they were brought to Falun Gong’s compound to interview Shen Yun dancers for glowing profiles to support their visa applications to stay in the United States — an issue that has long been a top priority for the dance group.
In March, after a Shen Yun dancer was questioned by a customs officer at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, The Epoch Times published articles, including one with the officer’s photo, that accused him of religious discrimination. The articles suggested that the customs agency had been infiltrated by the Chinese government.
In a statement, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that an internal investigation had showed that the allegations against the officer were unfounded.
Mr. Li and his movement also influenced the hiring and workplace practices of The Epoch Times.
A job opening for an editor circulated among practitioners in Britain last year said that the requirement for candidates to have journalism experience could be waived for Falun Gong practitioners.
Two former employees said they were told by a supervisor that practitioners did not need to come in with journalism experience because Falun Gong’s meditations gave them the wisdom to perform their jobs at a higher level than non-practitioners, whom adherents call “ordinary people.”
A former editor said that toward the end of her 11 years with the paper, she and other employees were required to attend a weekly staff meeting in the New York office to study Mr. Li’s religious texts. She quit soon after.
Last year, a reporter who worked at the newspaper’s office in Irvine, Calif., was called into a meeting with two top managers, Siyamak Khorrami and Joyce Kuo, after she had missed deadlines, according to three people familiar with the situation.
When the reporter said she was struggling with health issues, the editors replied that she could be healed through Falun Gong and pressured her to do its meditations, the people said. Ms. Kuo then led the reporter through the movements for more than an hour inside a conference room.
Ms. Kuo gave her a copy of Falun Gong’s core religious text and asked her to let the editors know if she wanted to join Falun Gong. She sent the reporter a long string of texts about the religion, including a video about its benefits, according to screenshots reviewed by The Times.
Mr. Khorrami told the reporter, who is Catholic, that the practice was superior to Christianity.
Still, she did not convert. She was put on a performance improvement plan and, two months later, was told that the paper could no longer afford to keep her. She was laid off.
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