This news is old and new. Epoch Times reports that it’s been happening for two decades. Taiwanese reporters are also routinely blocked by the United Nations in fealty to the People’s Republic of China (September 24, 2025).
Epoch Times senior White House correspondent Emel Akan traveled to New York City with the State Department press pool to cover activities attended by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio during the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 22.
Akan submitted her application for U.N. press credentials through the State Department and received an email telling her to pick up her press pass in New York City.
When she arrived on Sept. 22, a State Department official told Akan that the U.N. had rejected the application, using the excuse that it recognizes The Epoch Times as a nongovernmental organization, rather than a news organization.
“The Epoch Times is America’s fourth-largest newspaper. It is unacceptable that the United Nations caves to the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship efforts on American soil,” Epoch Times Editor-in-Chief Jasper Fakkert said in a statement on Sept. 23.
The UN also ignored the recent applications of two staffers in NTD’s Washington bureau. A UN representative told one of them, White House correspondent Mari Otsu, “that she did not meet the requirements, but declined to explain further.”
According to an eyewitness account that Epoch Times reported in 2024, in 2022 Xi Jinping secretly instructed China’s security agencies to redouble their efforts to squash The Epoch Times and its sister publication NTD.
But as part of its targeting of the spiritual movement Falun Gong, China has been pressuring the United Nations to deny press credentials to reporters associated with The Epoch Times for much longer than that.
“Pressure from the Chinese”
An early incident occurred in 2003. After a long delay, a UN official in New York City finally told NTD that “ ‘pressure from the Chinese’ had caused complications with its application to cover the Human Rights Commission events in Geneva. The same thing occurred again in June 2004, with a U.N. official acknowledging that the agency had received calls from Chinese officials about the broadcaster’s press access. The agency, after an initial rejection, eventually issued the credential.”
But this belated provision, like the admissions of China’s interference, proved to be the exception, not the rule. Usually, if they bother to answer at all, UN officials mutter meaningless generalities when “explaining” why they won’t grant credentials to Epoch Times and NTD staff. The officials should at least acknowledge their complicity and cowardice each time.
