The newfound grudging respect for coverage of the Wuhan Lab Leak story allows many of us to step back and walk down memory lane to recall how the corporate propaganda press vilified anyone who dared mention the narrative over the past year.
Especially delicious are the recent "corrections" to stories from last year that attempted to "fact-check" officials who pointed out major issues with the official storyline generated by the communist Chinese government.
When Sen. Tom Cotton and Sec. Mike Pompeo challenged Beijing authoritarians over their obstruction, lack of candor, and outright deceit in the critical early months of the pandemic, "fact-checkers" called them liars. Their source? The propagandists in Beijing.
What changed, @washingtonpost?
— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) June 1, 2021
full story: https://t.co/mIumSrbEKy pic.twitter.com/3y8sYyvChV
These shills for the communist authoritarian's who still revere Mao have been dragged quite a bit in the past several days, and rightly so. Remarkably, rather than taking the "L," they're attempting to push back and sanctimoniously still claim they're the only ones here adhering to virtuous journalistic standards.
Take the Washington Post's "Pinnochio Guy" Glenn Kessler. This is a grown man whose primary job is to run cover for Democrats by assigning cartoon characters to people he has deemed as "liars" in the media or politics.
As critics were taking a bit of a victory lap over the literal rewriting of history now that it seems pretty clear that the early censorship of Wuhan lab leak investigations was misguided at best, totalitarian censorship at worst, Kessler tried to indignantly defend himself.
Somehow The Federalist managed to write a story saying The Washington Post "quietly" changed a headline on a 2020 Wuhan Labs story with ever mentioning we have a big correction at the top of the article noting the change in headline and in body of the story. ?? pic.twitter.com/zvgB1D5XDn
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) June 1, 2021
As usual, Kessler obliquely misses the point. The fact that the WaPo story even required such a drastic correction in the first place is the story.
Paulina Firozi's entire column was ostensibly a "fact-check" on Sen. Cotton calling him out for repeating a "debunked conspiracy theory," and it turns out the column had no factual basis for calling out the senator in the first place.
Further, the "corrected" column now refers to the Wuhan lab leak theory put out by Cotton as a "fringe theory." Fringe? There is literally more evidence that the virus originated at the lab in Wuhan than from a random transfer from bat to human at the Wuhan market, the "party line story" from Beijing that had been parrotted by journalists here in America right up until about a week ago.
Who's the fringe theory conspiracy nut in this picture?
The bottom line for Kessler and WaPo is this: Why would a story that set itself out to "correct" a senator need so many corrections itself? We thought these articles were supposed to "see the record straight." We thought democracy died in darkness, not footnotes.
Now, this would all be fun and games in the Left vs. Right media tit for tat game we all enjoy playing, but in the case of the Covid-19 virus, the ramifications of towing the communist party line for over a year have been deadly serious.
Every day spent believing the ChiCom's lies about the origins of the virus was a day not honing in on the truth of this virus. Not lasering in on the truth kept our scientists chasing their tails, running down false leads and expending time and resources that could have been spent utilizing the truth of this virus in their quest for a vaccine and a cure.
In short: China lied, and people died.
Worse than that, Democrats and their propagandists in the media repeated those lies, viciously attacked any contrarian as a "conspiracy nut," and worked hand-in-glove with the Chinese government to accomplish their goals.
As is typical, the worst offender in this shameful episode of the 2020 pandemic is Gov. Andrew Cuomo. His insidious and unserious insistence on using the term "European Virus" not only played into Beijing's narrative but it threw so much ambiguity into the origin narrative that it effectively conveyed the message that knowing the origin of the virus was unimportant.
It is not.
Not only were there enormous scientific and forensic benefits of knowing just what we were dealing with in this deadly pandemic, but the geopolitical ramifications connected to the origin narrative can't be overstated.
If a virus that caused a worldwide pandemic was found to have leaked from the military lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland I tend to doubt liberal pundits would be shrugging off the origin as something that “doesn’t matter”
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 1, 2021
The willingness to throw down with the propagandists in Beijing served the only agenda Democrats, and the media had while Americans were dying by the thousands: It hurt Donald Trump. And in working together to that end, Democrats, the media, and the ChiComs accomplished their mission... no matter how many Americans had to suffer for that end.
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