Publicity: Good, Bad, Whatever? As Long As They Spell Your Name Correctly, It’s All Good, Right? Wrong!

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By Jo-Ann “Jo D NL” Duke

Well, that’s what they have always said right? Imagine, though when somebody opens a paper, sees an article mentioning someone they know, and when they continue reading, to their amazement, they see their own name.

This recently happened to the former mayor of my home town. There was a free newspaper delivered to the mailboxes in my area; its name is The Epoch Times. This man, Dennis O’Keefe, who was the mayor for many years in St. John’s, noticed the paper in his mail; so before he got rid of it, he decided to take a look.

As he was glancing through the paper, he noticed a picture of someone he had met during his time as mayor; it was a mayor from one of the other Canadian provinces; so he decided to read the article. In it, it was an article about Communist China’s Silent War Against The West.

The former St. John’s mayor said he couldn’t believe it when he read through a story in the Epoch Times saying that he was a target of influence of the Chinese government.

The article stated that his name was found in a 2019 document that came from the Daqing Foreign Affairs Office in China. The article said that the information which had been obtained included names “spanning a wide range of sectors and countries in which the Chinese regime seeks to cultivate talent.”

“It’s just inexplicable,” said O’Keefe, who retired from the mayoral position years before, said that the article was “terribly misleading,” and that nobody from the Epoch Times had contacted him for comment.

The paper involved has been trying to increase subscription so they have been distributing free copies around Canada; apparently The Epoch Times is a controversial paper that started 20 years ago, has its headquarters in New York, and is available in 22 languages and 36 countries.

It has often been considered controversial for publishing articles that promote unfounded conspiracy theories, with some of them having been embraced by alt-right groups, and many of the conspiracies about China; the paper has said that they started in a response to the communist censorship and repression in China.

My question is, can anyone explain why a newspaper that has posted all of these conspiracies; what are they doing, and why are they involving people that most people normally would never have heard of, outside of their own cities, in a story that has no connection to them. Dennis O’Keefe said that there has never been any contact with anyone from China, so he doesn’t know where they got his name, or that they considered him for cultivation.

Well, that’s it for now, I just thought that I would share an interesting if somewhat strange situation with all my friends on the Twittersphere. Signing off from the original Rock, Newfoundland with much love for all my American friends.

As they say, peace out. For once, it’s really a possibility, I think.

Jo D NL

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