My Take | US hack feigns outrage at Huawei’s ‘bribe’
- A Washington Post reporter’s response to an offer from Huawei to visit its headquarters taught the firm what it is up against with the US news media
It will be hard to find a greater virtue-signalling hack than Josh Rogin from The Washington Post.
Scandal-hit Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies is on a public-relations campaign to change its terrible image in the United States and is offering what we in the media biz call junket trips to American journalists to visit its headquarters in Shenzhen.
Many multinationals do this, all the time, including American companies and government agencies. The common practice may be public relations involving a great deal of positive spin, but it is not bribery. As a rule, they place no restrictions on what you can report or write about.
But here’s Rogin’s response, broadcast to the world via Twitter: “Thanks for this offer but I am forbidden by Washington Post policies and also by personal ethics from taking thousands of dollars in gifts from a foreign corporation that acts as an arm of a foreign government intelligence agency.”
I am sure Huawei, even if it were completely corrupt, would not have been stupid enough to offer him “thousands of dollars”, and if it did, he would not have tweeted it, but wrote it up as a front-page story in The Washington Post.