9 Times The Media Weaponized Coronavirus Coverage To Attack Trump
- Mainstream media outlets, from the New York Times to CNN, wasted no time placing the blame for coronavirus at the feet of President Trump.
With the first U.S. coronavirus fatality confirmed in Washington state this weekend, one would expect media coverage to provide American people crucial, but measured information about the oncoming pandemic.
...Indeed, it has gotten worse, but the media is not stoking hysteria in a way that would push Americans to take sensible precautions.
Mainstream outlets have instead responded with coronavirus stories that lie about and misrepresent President Trump and his administration’s response to the virus.
Journalists have cheered on the spread of the virus and its potentially devastating effects as a way of validating the horrors of a Trump presidency, not to mention a Trump re-election.
Here are just nine examples:
1. Washington Post Columnist Lies About Trump ‘Hoax’ Quote
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank tweeted eight times this weekend about a now-debunked claim that President Trump deemed the coronavirus threat a “hoax” at his campaign rally in South Carolina. As is often the case with media reactions to Trump quotes, an examination of the president’s remarks in context not only proves the reporting inaccurate, but also usually reveals Trump to be right about whatever controversial subject is in play.
“Trump, in South Carolina, just called the coronavirus a ‘hoax,'” Milbank tweeted.
In context, Trump was complaining about Democrats politicizing the pandemic, just like they did with Russia and Ukraine hysteria for the sake of impeachment. “They tried the impeachment hoax that was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax,” he said.
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After problems arose with the C.D.C.’s test, officials could have switched to using successful tests that other countries were already using. But the officials refused to do so, essentially because it would have required changing bureaucratic procedures.
The federal government could also have eased regulations on American hospitals and laboratories, to allow them to create and manufacture their own tests, as Melissa Miller of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine told The Washington Post. But federal officials did not do so for weeks.
