CFO Of The Epoch Times Charged With Participating In Scheme To Launder At Least $67 Million In Fraud Proceeds

As alleged, Bill Guan, the Chief Financial Officer of a global newspaper and media company, conspired with others to benefit himself, the media company, and its affiliates by laundering tens of millions of dollars in fraudulently obtained unemployment insurance benefits and other crime proceeds.  When banks raised questions about the funds, Guan allegedly lied repeatedly and falsely claimed that the funds came from legitimate donations to the media company.

Since graduating with a journalism degree nearly 15 years ago, I’ve worked on honing my internal bias detector.

One thing I've come to accept is that there is no such thing as a completely neutral news outlet. Every publication is biased in some way because every media outlet is run by people.

The good media outlets are those that try to set up guardrails to counter the natural biases that reporters may bring into a story.

Those guardrails include things like publishing retractions to erroneous statements, checking the credentials of those who give statements, and avoiding the use of anonymous sources.

The bad media outlets do none of those things. They take up the mantle of the demagogue who constantly claims everything is “fake news”, and they publish anything which corroborates the demagogue's story rather than doing actual journalism work.

I'm not mad at people for getting suckered into reading The Epoch Times. I understand that when your worldview is built up around a narrative, you do whatever you can to validate it. Challenging your core identities is painful¹; it's more comforting to find news that parrots back your beliefs, even if it's wrong.

So while I understand the human instincts at work, I'm furious at those who choose to exploit those instincts.

And of course The Epoch Times attracted the kind of person who would allegedly attempt a $63 million money laundering scheme².

The internet enables all kinds of speech to propagate at incredible speed. We need to all be better about honing our internal bias detectors and find ways to help each other not get suckered in by those who would try to harm us with blatant lies.