HEADLINE HEALTH – The Associated Press is distributing a video by a former Chinese Communist Party broadcaster in which she accuses Americans of vaccine disinformation.
AP’s coverage of Jingyi Sun’s video highlights her links to the University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Michigan State University and the University of Florida. The AP headline identifies Jingyi Sun as a “Stevens Expert,” a reference to her current position as a business professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Yet nowhere in its coverage does the AP disclose Jingyi Sun’s long ties to the Chinese Communist Party and official state propaganda. Unmentioned by the AP is the fact that Jingyi Sun received her bachelor’s degree in Journalism and English from Beijing Foreign Studies University, a university under the direct administration of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education.
AP also fails to mention that Jingyi Sun appeared on China Central TV (CCTV) for nearly seven years. Based in Beijing, CCTV is a Chinese state-owned broadcast network controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The network carries 50 channels of CCP-approved programming in six languages with programs accessible to more than one billion viewers.
Stevens Institute of Technology also covered Jingyi Sun’s claims in a January 27 press release titled “Defusing Fake News: New Stevens Research Points the Way.” The story — posted to the institution’s Facebook page and its media relations page — uses the term “fake news” ten times, yet makes no references to Jingyi Sun’s background as an actual communist news propagandist.
Jingyi Sun also holds a Master’s degree in Film Aesthetics from University of Oxford and a PhD from University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Watch the video here …
VIDEO [02:40] | Jingyi Sun, Stevens Institute of Technology via Headline USA
ORIGINAL ASSOCIATED PRESS COVERAGE:
Stevens Expert on COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation on Facebook
AP, Feb 17, 2022
Jingyi Sun is an Assistant Professor in the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.
She was part of a research team from institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Michigan State University and the University of Florida that recently analyzed thousands of Facebook posts, from nearly 2,000 public accounts specifically focused on COVID vaccine information, published between March 2020 and March 2021.
Here she comments on some of the findings, including roughly half of the posts studied included false information about COVID vaccines, while the other half were chiefly efforts to fact-check, dispute or debunk false vaccine claims.
The posts received millions of total engagements in the Facebook community. In addition, she describes the coordination of misinformation spreaders and how this research reveals new strategies to combat bad health information.
