America’s mainstream media is lousy even in the best of times.
This is not the best of times.
All the bias, incompetence, mendacity and just plain manifest stupidity of national media has been on even sharper display than usual during the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.
Consider this roundup just a small sampler of the many ways our media has failed to provide accurate, unbiased news during the crisis:
The mainstream media’s routine parroting of propaganda from China’s communist government as it relates to their Wuhan coronavirus cases has been well-documented here at RedState and elsewhere. But what continues to be shocking is how many national news media outlets keep doing so without any trace of shame whatsoever.
Case in point, NBC News, who tweeted out this gem early this morning about the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths reported in the U.S. in a 24 hour-plus time period in comparison to China in the same timeframe:
U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours.
Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported. https://t.co/ooXkR9X2L5
— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 7, 2020
Two things came to mind to me when I read that tweet:
First, it came across as an unnecessary cheap shot “gotcha” similar to how the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler tried to dunk on President Trump by saying his comments about the low unemployment rate during the SOTU “did not age well” in light of the millions of jobs lost in recent weeks.
The second thing was that it sounded like something you’d read on any one of the number of Chinese government-run “media” accounts on Twitter, bragging about how they were doing so much better at combating the virus than the United States.
It’s pretty clear that there is a concerted effort by outlets like CNN to bury their erroneous reporting and downplaying of the Wuhan coronavirus threat by deflecting to Fox News, but the evidence shows CNN was among the worst offenders.
Beyond that, CNN has also been a willing participant in the Chinese government’s propaganda war against the United States, slammed Fox News for covering New York’s response failures – even though CNN’s Jake Tapper covered them the very next day, has purposely and deceptively used the “per capita” label on a selective basis when reporting on US cases in a way that paints the U.S. in an unflattering light, and ran with the absurd “man dies from swallowing fish tank cleaner” story as a way to falsely blame Trump.
The only conclusion to draw from this is that the paper’s report is another example on a long list of them on how the MSM actually seems to be rooting against the use of hydroxychloroquine as a promising treatment for suffering Wuhan Coronavirus patients because Orange Man Bad, so much so that they’re willing to deceive their readers as to the nature of Trump’s supposed “financial interest” in it.
Further, this alleged link is that a company that makes a name-brand version is a small percentage of the holdings of a mutual fund President Trump has money in:
Such a garbage take by @nytimes. Here's page from Dodge & Cox Stock Fund most recent annual report, have to dig deep to find Sanofi holding highlighted by NYT, and it's a small percentage of total fund. pic.twitter.com/fzTQZxxi4W
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) April 7, 2020
By this standard, I evidently have a “financial interest” in every company in the Fortune 500…
Once again, this is just a small sample of the horrible state of our current media. If I wanted to include every cornavirus screwup, I’d still be writing it…