Epoch Times is a newspaper affiliated with the Falun Gong. It serves as a tool for cult propaganda and anti-China messaging. Epoch Times strives to present itself as a mainstream Chinese-language media, but it frequently devotes extensive space to denigrate and smear China, vilify the Communist Party of China, the Chinese government, the Chinese people, and traditional Chinese culture. It ignores China’s reform and opening-up achievements, exaggerates problems, fills its reports with falsehoods, disregards facts, and lacks basic professional journalism ethics. Epoch Times runs substantial coverage of Falun Gong activities and developments, praise for Li Hongzhi and Falun Gong, and collaborates with Falun Gong-affiliated media to spread racial discrimination and hatred, promote cult ideology, and exert spiritual control over adherents. Epoch Times has also engaged in widespread copyright infringement of Chinese citizens and news organizations, repeatedly pirating images, audio, and video from Chinese news outlets for negative interpretation. In March 26, 2014, Epoch Times was ordered by a U.S. court to publicly apologize and pay USD 80,000 for copying works by the renowned Chinese comedian Ma Ji. In short, Epoch Times is not a genuine news outlet; it is a propaganda instrument of the Falun Gong cult.