Yes I did see the Apple Daily coverage, and I think from their perspective and with the Taiwan businessman angle the story had more legs. Perhaps that was what led to Simon's decision to subsidize the report and he was blindsided by the way the story was propagated and framed in U.S. coverage. Kind of an interesting story-within-a-story there.

While the two are being conflated now in the predictably incomplete U.S. coverage, Jimmy Lai's media empire and the nascent Epoch Times media empire are two totally distinct entities. Is another subtext of this whole affair that there is a sort of media sphere coalescing around anti-CCP narratives that is willing to use the kind of misinformation/disinformation tactics outlined in the NYT article that came out this week?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/technology/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong.html