Short answer: CGTN — China Global Television Network — is the international arm of CCTV, China Central Television, the state broadcaster of the People's Republic of China. And CCTV does not answer to shareholders or a board; it operates under the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. So when you ask "who owns CGTN," the honest answer is not a company or a family. It is the Chinese state, and above it, the Party. CGTN is not a network that happens to align with Beijing — it is Beijing's own outward-facing channel, launched in December 2016 to carry China's message to an English-speaking world. * That is not an accusation from a rival; it is the finding of Western regulators using CGTN's own paperwork. On February 4, 2021, the UK's broadcasting regulator Ofcom revoked CGTN's licence to broadcast in Britain (Ofcom, 2021). The reason was structural: the licence was held by a company, Star China Media, that exercised no real editorial control, and the entity that did control the output — CGTNC — was found to be controlled by CCTV, which is controlled by the Communist Party. Under UK law a body ultimately controlled by a political party cannot hold a broadcast licence. CGTN's own submissions during the case are what established the chain of control. It was, in effect, disqualified by its own description of itself. * The United States reached the same conclusion by a different route. In 2018 the Department of Justice ordered CGTN America to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and it did so on February 1, 2019 (US DOJ / FARA records). In 2020 the State Department went further and designated CGTN, along with parent CCTV and other outlets, as "foreign missions" — the same label applied to embassies — on the grounds that they are effectively controlled by a foreign government. Two of the world's largest media markets, independently, classified CGTN not as a news organisation but as an instrument of a state. * The concrete episode that crystallised it was a person, not a policy. In March 2021, weeks after pulling its licence, Ofcom fined CGTN £225,000 for serious breaches — £100,000 of it over the broadcast of what amounted to a forced confession. British businessman Peter Humphrey, detained in China, had been shown on CGTN confessing to offences before any trial, filmed in custody in front of his captors. Ofcom ruled the channel "ought to have been aware" that his consent could not have been genuine (Press Gazette; Hong Kong Free Press, 2021). The remaining fines covered coverage of the Hong Kong protests that breached impartiality rules. Airing coerced confessions is not a bias problem you can argue about — it is a line most newsrooms would never approach. * None of this makes every CGTN broadcast false. State media can and does report accurate facts, and CGTN produces slick documentaries and business coverage. The issue is structural incentive: on any subject where the Party has a position — Xinjiang, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, the South China Sea, the government's own record — CGTN exists to advance that position, because that is its assigned function, not a lapse in editorial judgment. There is no independent proprietor, no adversarial relationship with the government, no mechanism by which the channel could hold Beijing to account. The absence of that mechanism is the whole point of the channel. * On our least-biased-news ranking we grade outlets by who owns them and how openly, and CGTN is the clarifying case at the far end of the scale: fully state-owned, Party-directed, and stripped of a UK licence on the strength of its own admissions. That doesn't mean never read it — it means read it exactly as what it is, a government telling you its own story in its own words, and cross-check every claim against a source that Beijing does not control.