Vox, the smarmy Obama hipster "explainer" news site that purports to know how the world works better than you, has been found shilling Chinese political propaganda. The news was first spotted by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit at the Washington Free Beacon, and though the piece was written several weeks ago, it's definitely eye-catching. Vox, founded by Ezra Klein in 2011 at the height of the Obama era, for all its pretenses to being modern and hip and Millennial, is really just a shill for the old gray men of Beijing.

Explanatory media website Vox has been receiving money from a Chinese communist government-backed front organization. A recent Vox blog post by foreign editor Yochi Dreazen titled, "The big winner of the Trump-Kim summit? China" discloses at the bottom of the piece that the reporting was subsidized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation. "This reporting was supported by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a privately funded nonprofit organization based in Hong Kong that is dedicated to 'facilitating open and constructive exchange among policy-makers, business leaders, academics, think-tanks, cultural figures, and educators from the United States and China,'" the post states in a note at the bottom.

Cripes, what an astonishing black eye for a group that claims to be doing a new kind of better "journalism." And it's impossible to not be exposed if one reads that site, given that its disclaimers are put at the bottom of its pieces, right after a reader has spent time reading them.

Like any leftist outfit, it's obviously convinced that rules of journalism, such as not publishing state communist propaganda alongside regular news, don't apply to it. What other newspaper publishes paid Chinese state propaganda? We sure don't. Here at American Thinker we regularly turn down pieces that have foreign government sponsorship, and that goes for any government. We don't print this kind of thing. What would Vox say to another newspaper that publishes Russian RT News propaganda? It's simply not done.

What's more, this isn't the first time Vox's founder has shown such slovenly journalistic ethics. Klein, after all, is the founder of JournoList, the collusion group of journalists and Obama administration operatives who coordinated talking points to enhance the Obama administration's "narratives," and probably should be investigated for anti-trust violations, given that the news agencies were supposedly competitors. You know that if drug companies did what Klein did, they'd have the regulators all over them. Klein did that while he was at the Washington Post, with no consequences, given that he was their bright young man at the time.

Why does this matter? Because Vox's reports, presumably the paid Chinese propaganda reports, are indexed in such privileged top spots in Google News and Firefox's Pocket that it's impossible not to see its pieces any time one tries to look for news. In the news industry, those privileged indexings suggest a company that's getting a lot of traffic and doing well ad-wise. But then Vox's taking of money from Chinese state propaganda outlets suggests exactly the opposite: an organization down at its heels desperate to rake in any income.

That contradictory picture suggests other things going on, and none of them is good: either Vox has an artificially boosted rankings for its news based on its powerful patrons at Google or Vox is so fond of promoting the ChiCom propaganda line itself that it's willing to throw its reputation to the wind, thinking its readers don't care. A third possibility is that Vox is greedy for any income and will take it from all givers, ethics be damned.

None of this make the people running the site look good.

Its new journalism of the left pretty obviously is now to be viewed as warmed over repackaged leftism, with a Made in China label stuck to the bottom.