It is about as reliable as the NYT or CNN.

I don’t trust the NYT much less than I did in the meantime, still a bit more CNN, but it’s perfectly alright to verify content regardless of the source. Reuters, AP, and a lot of Western media have 'business agreements" with Chinese state-media (which, essentially, means they have agreements with the Chinese Communist Party). There is a brief article, The Politics of Pure Business, published by the China Media Project some time ago if you are interested.

Influence operation in the West by Chinese media goes far beyond this. A great project about this is Lingua Sinica, a tool enabling you to research possible Chinese influence in any country’s media. It’s an exceptional source. So the influence can come from all sides, not just the U.S. or any Western government.

What makes Chinese state-media outlets special is they are inherently propaganda tools. They publish everything what the Party wants, and nothing what the Party doesn’t want. This is not comparable to any Western media, no matter whether the Western outlets are publicly or privately funded. I don’t say that we in the West have a perfect media, but the structure in China is fundamentally different.

You can see this now in the U.S. very clearly, for example. Despite the fact that the Florida man is trying to turn his country into a dictatorship close to the one in China, you can read a lot of articles and reports in the U.S. that are critical of Donald Trump. But you can’t find even a single critical article about Xi Jinping in Chinese media.

But surely we can agree not to use SCMP, RT, and VoA? Just because things get bad doesn’t mean we have to actively reach for the bottom.

Places like Al Jazeera and the Associated Press exist.