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]