BROADCAST RUSE
After regurgitating Chinese propaganda on COVID that makes Trump look bad, CNN suddenly reports the truth
CNN has just breathlessly announced that it has uncovered a “vast trove of leaked documents show[ing] China underreported COVID-19 numbers” and deliberately covered up the seriousness of the epidemic.
The only trouble with CNN’s blockbuster is that it is almost a year old.
The rest of the world has known since February or so that China’s Communist leaders hid the epidemic from the world for as long as they could. After the outbreak began late last year in the city of Wuhan, they silenced their own doctors and blocked visits from outside medical investigators. They lied about the virus to the WHO, and then got the WHO to lie for them. They allowed travelers from China to spread the virus to more than 180 countries at the same time they were putting tens of millions of their own people in quarantine.
Beijing did all this while reporting such ridiculously low numbers of cases and deaths that most credible news organizations were skeptical.
Real journalists, such as those who work at our government-funded Radio Free Asia, started digging. RFA reported at the end of March that the death toll in Wuhan was many times higher than the 2,500 or so that Beijing was claiming at the time. As bodies piled up in the city’s crematoria and truckloads of funeral urns arrived for the ashes of the deceased, they estimated the actual number of coronavirus victims at 46,800.
CNN, on the other hand, swallowed Beijing’s narrative whole and soon began regurgitating its propaganda in the same fashion.
On April 15, 2020, for example, CNN reported that “not a single serving member of the country’s military has been infected.” America, however, wasn’t doing so well:
“The reported absence of cases among China’s armed forces comes despite the fact that thousands of military personnel were sent to Wuhan to assist in front line medical efforts. It also comes in sharp contrast to . . . the United States, which ha[s] seen an uptick in cases in recent weeks.”
What was CNN’s source for its report that China’s military was handling the coronavirus much better than America’s armed forces? The Web site of the People’s Liberation Army of Communist China, which of course is no fan of the US military.
Over the past year, CNN has lifted a lot of its coronavirus stories directly from Beijing’s propaganda broadsheets, but my all-time favorite is this gem from April 7, 2020:
“China reported no new novel coronavirus deaths or locally transmitted cases yesterday, according to the country’s National Health Commission . . . There were 32 new cases — all of them imported from abroad.”
Leave aside the predictable effort to shift the blame for the epidemic onto foreigners. They are always a convenient whipping boy for the xenophobic CCP.
Just consider the claim of “no new cases” in a country the size of China. And ask yourself this: If that were true, why were the 11 million inhabitants of Wuhan, along with millions elsewhere in China, still under lockdown? It’s absurd on the face of it.
Could it be that the woke elites at CNNwere more than happy to report, virtually verbatim, the most outrageous claims of the CCP simply in order to make the United States and President Trump’s handling of the epidemic look bad by comparison?
And now that the election is over, have they perhaps decided that it’s time to stop serving as the unofficial propaganda arm of the CCP — at least where the coronavirus is concerned — lest they make the next president look bad?
As for me, I will stay glued to CNN, waiting with bated breath for their next “exclusive.”
Maybe by next year CNN will “discover” that the China Virus came from . . . China.
Now that would be news.