Isn’t it “nice” to know that one of the most important newspapers in America, owned by the wealthiest man in the world, dismissed a key part of the coronavirus origin story because … Trump?
You may have thought the media falling for the Trump-is-a-Russian-secret-agent hoax – for years – was journalistic malpractice and treachery, and you’re right.
This is worse.
The self-described “fact-checker” of The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, admits in a splashy article that because Leftist legacy media reporters (my words, not his) didn’t like President Donald Trump, they ignored his warnings that the “China virus” possibly escaped from a Wuhan, China, lab. They denounced it as a “thoroughly debunked theory.” And they ignored him and his legitimate warnings because they believed the usage of the term was racist.
Put another way, political correctness, blind hatred, and leftist wokism contributed to the burying of a key component of the most important story of our lifetimes.
Repeating: these “reporters [and] activists in white lab coats,” as the vindicated Senator Tom Cotton calls them, committed lies of omission because the theory, which was perfectly logical, came from their political opposition, whom they could not stand.
Kessler wrote that “important information was available from the start but was generally ignored.”
Apparently, the “important information” that was “ignored” didn’t rise to the level of their notice.
Global hegemony, U.S. national security, World Health Organization veracity, outing the malevolence of the Chinese Communist Party, and maybe even peoples’ very lives depended on getting the story right. But the Leftist legacy media’s collective egos mattered more.
Kessler goes over the timeline of the first stories about COVID, back when we were still calling it the novel coronavirus, but he gives the Leftist legacy media a complete pass for their catastrophic failure to do their basic jobs because they had another job to do: undermine the president.
The source of the coronavirus that has left more than 3 million people dead around the world remains a mystery. But in recent months the idea that it emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — once dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory — has gained new credence.
And who dismissed the possible Wuhan lab-leak story “as a ridiculous conspiracy theory”? Why the self-same Leftist legacy media such as The Washington Post, which called it “tin-hat nonsense.”
Kessler continues his framing of the timeline to prepare a soft landing for the Never-Trumpers in the press corps.
How and why did this happen? For one, efforts to discover a natural source of the virus have failed. Second, early efforts to spotlight a lab leak often got mixed up with speculation that the virus was deliberately created as a bioweapon. That made it easier for many scientists to dismiss the lab scenario as tin-hat nonsense. But a lack of transparency by China and renewed attention to the activities of the Wuhan lab have led some scientists to say they were too quick to discount a possible link at first.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) from the start pointed to the lab’s location in Wuhan, pressing China for answers, so the history books will reward him if he turns out to be right. The Trump administration also sought to highlight the lab scenario but generally could only point to vague intelligence. The Trump administration’s messaging was often accompanied by anti-Chinese rhetoric that made it easier for skeptics to ignore its claims. [emphasis added]
I’m assured by journalism professors that the nation’s newspapers are the “first draft of history.” So, Glenn, who in the history-writing business would “reward” Tom Cotton “if he turns out to be right”? Talk about kicking the can down the road. Could you have at least tried?
Neither Trump nor Senator Tom Cotton said there was an absolute causal relationship between the outbreak and the Level 4 lab in Wuhan, but Cotton did say there were known knowns they should have used as a starting point. He told Salem Radio host Hugh Hewitt Tuesday morning that connecting the dots was a simple case of common sense.
What I was saying last year was what any common-sense Arkansan would say. Isn’t it a shocking coincidence that a novel coronavirus occurred, not in some remote village next to a colony of bats from a nearby cave, but in downtown Wuhan, a city larger than New York, with two labs known to research coronaviruses? I mean, what a shocking coincidence. And since then, the evidence has all piled up in the direction of those laboratories. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal last April, it obviously didn’t come from the food market. That was a cover-up from the very beginning. We knew they were researching coronaviruses. Our diplomats had gone there in 2018 and reported on shockingly lax safety practices.
But the media, whose judgment and simple pattern-recognition was overcome by Trump Derangement Syndrome, couldn’t and wouldn’t try to connect the dots.
Indeed, they declared the exact opposite. Becket Adams in the Washington Examiner collected the calumny months ago.
The press was quick to denounce the Republican lawmaker. It’s a “myth,” declared USA Today. The senator is playing a “dangerous game,” said CNN. It’s a “fringe theory,” proclaimed the New York Times.
Remember this exchange in March of 2020 when Trump was blamed for an uptick in “anti-Asian” crime because he used the “China virus” phrase?
Q: "Why do you keep calling this the Chinese Virus?"
President Trump: "It comes from China…it's not racist."
Full video here: https://t.co/GwQnJ0pwmo pic.twitter.com/L1dD05z4RK
— CSPAN (@cspan) March 18, 2020
The media, majoring in minors, wasted valuable time denouncing Trump instead of considering that Orange Man Bad actually had the best interest of the nation in mind even as he and the rest of the administration tried to get their arms around the pandemic.
Trump doing something right? Unthinkable.
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