NBC News
Analysis #020 Β· July 6, 2026 Β· 2 min read
Politics
NBC, NPR and ABC All Credited Trump by Name for Freeing a Chinese Pastor. None of Them Led With the 17 Church Leaders Still Locked Up.
Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri freed18 Zion Church leaders detained together, Oct. 202517 of them still imprisoned in ChinaTrump raised the case with Xi Jinping in MayOwner: Comcast
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Here's a genuinely nice thing to say about network news: when Trump does something that deserves credit, NBC, NPR and ABC all put his name directly in the win. NBC's headline: "Chinese pastor released from prison after Trump raised his case with Xi Jinping." NPR and ABC ran nearly the same line off the wire: "Pastor freed from prison in China weeks after Trump requested his release." No hedging, no scare quotes around "requested." A president leaned on Xi Jinping in Beijing in May, and two months later Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri landed in Los Angeles. Outlets that get accused daily of never giving this president a win said so plainly. Good on them. Now the part none of those headlines carried: Jin wasn't detained alone. Chinese authorities picked up 18 leaders of his Zion Church together last October -- one of the largest crackdowns on a single congregation in decades. Seventeen of them are still in China. Human rights groups flagged it a few paragraphs into the same stories that led with Jin's homecoming: the other seventeen names didn't get a presidential phone call, so they didn't get a headline either. We're not knocking the coverage of Jin's release -- it's accurate, it's fair to Trump, and it should run exactly as written. We just think the seventeen people still sitting in Chinese jail cells, with no head of state currently asking about them, are the story that needs the follow-up. That's the piece we'd like to see next.
β€œOne phone call from a president got a pastor a headline. The other seventeen still in jail didn't get a phone call -- or a headline.”
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