Who was NBC’s “China expert?” Ken Silverstein looked into his credentials:
“When Lauer asked Ramo if the Games would change China, he replied, ‘I think China is changed irrevocably after these 17 days. It is a full aware part of the international community and they know that their behavior in that community is going to have to be different than in the past.’
So who is Ramo? According to a recent piece in the Albuquerque Journal, he ‘works as a managing director and partner at the Beijing office of Kissinger Associates.’ Which explains a lot.
Shouldn’t NBC identify Ramo as an employee of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is one of the Americans closest to the Chinese leadership and whose business involves opening doors for Western companies seeking to do business in China?”
“The NBC team was predictably vapid — Matt Lauer described the Central African Republic as ‘a republic in Central Africa’—but the person who really stood out was the network’s hired China analyst, Joshua Cooper Ramo, who couldn’t find enough wonderful things to say about China.” [Read]