This is a bullshit article. The headline mentions 'pay for play' and the opening paragraph links the Committee of 100, a Chinese government outreach organization, to 26 individuals in US media, again mentioning pay-for-play trips.

Well, that's the last mention of any pay or indeed play in the article. That an outreach organization has the goal of improving perception of a country and reshaping coverage of that country abroad does not seem especially dramatic to me. The US State Department operates Foreign Press Centers * for precisely this purpose, and there are several nonprofits like the Foreign Press Association and Association of Foreign Press Correspondents that do the same; just having nonprofit status means they have an implicit financial relationship with the federal government. I'm sure the Foreign Press Centers keep track of how their efforts shape media perception of the US abroad (it'd be a waste of public money if they didn't) and I'd be surprised if none of the other entities in this field didn't do something similar.

* https://2021-2025.state.gov/about-us-foreign-press-centers/

The promise of 'pay to play' revelations in this article suggests that people in US media received financial compensation of some kind. I opened the article expecting to read about something like the Tenet Media investigation, which found that Russia had provided about $10 million to various US social media influencers through a front company.* But the only actual monies detailed in this article talk about money ($60,000 in 2012 $, equivalent to maybe $150k today) being spent to wine and dine them, arrange tours of historical landmarks etc.

To be sure, the 'Committee of 100' organization mentioned in the article indeed seems to have ties to the Chinese communist Party. But the communists are the government in China and have been for nearly a century now. It seems like the writer feels they should slink about ashamed of themselves, and that engaging any sort of PR on their own behalf is somehow malicious. Conversely, she appears to think that accepting any sort of hospitality at all fatally compromises anyone in media. Perhaps she's sincere in this, but then I wonder why she didn't go with a more factual headline like 'China seeks to craft positive image of itself with foreign media' rather than promising a story about a 'pay for play' scheme that never materializes.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Tenet_Media_investigation