The Collective Failure
I spent my career in the TV news business. I’m appalled at the poor job the journalism trade has done with Chinese Communist pandemic—clearly one of the biggest stories of the century.
I’m talking about the collective failure—globally—to mount the biggest investigative reporting effort the world has ever seen. The pandemic has claimed thousands of lives and left millions unemployed. Yet, we still don’t know the truth about how it started or where it came from.
Most of the so-called Mainstream Media is missing in action or ducking for cover on the issue of the origin of the coronavirus.
Some western reporters are terrified of being called racists. So, they use euphemisms and go to great lengths to avoid calling the Chinese Communist government what it is. The rights-crushing, iron-fisted Communist Party of China represents that nation’s elite, not its 1.4 billion people.
Journalism today is not a noble profession. To paraphrase an old aphorism, we’re better off not knowing how laws and sausages AND news stories are made. News reporting isn’t as glamorous as some its practitioners think it is.
A Profession of Copycats
The term herd journalism has a lot of truth to it.
Newspapers and networks desperately want to have the same story as their competitors. They crave the ability to say ‘Yeah, we had that story, too.’ They shamelessly copy from one another, creating a news echo chamber.
A Weak Story in the Post
‘We had it, too” is a powerful driver in the news business. Consider a story in the Washington Post in February.
It rips Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton for suggesting the virus is a Chinese bioweapon. It’s true that claims the virus is a bioweapon are very doubtful.
“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” is the headline. Wait a minute. Who already debunked it? More on that in a moment.
Viral Weapon Doubtful, Lab Source Not Disproved
First, it should be re-stated that far-right claims the virus is a biological warfare weapon are probably false. A “weaponized” lethal pathogen that can’t be controlled doesn’t make sense except, perhaps, for a suicidal doomsday cult.
But that does not disprove the possibility that the virus, in its natural state, was being researched in a Chinese military bio-weapons lab. Not all deadly pathogens in a research environment are modified to be weapons. The Wuhan lab is China’s only high-security pathogen lab. It has been publicly identified with the SARS virus. Whether the Wuhan lab is involved in biowarfare research is a state secret.
In shooting down the bio-weapon claim, the Washington Post article infers that the virus couldn’t come from a military research lab. THAT is not true. No one outside China, including the Washington Post and its so-called experts, knows where the virus originated.
Experts?
The Post article cites “numerous experts.” What experts?
The story cites two professors, and neither has any identified biological warfare experience. One is Richard Ebright. He’s a highly credentialed molecular biologist at Rutgers University.
He has extensive experience in microbiology research but his bio shows no involvement with or expertise in military bio-weapon research. The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases web site shows nothing related to Prof. Ebright.
DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has no listing of a biowarfare research grant for Professor Ebright. Civilian researchers get DARPA grants for work for the military.
When there was a conference at the lab in Wuhan in 2017 between U.S. and Chinese experts about lethal pathogens, Ebright wasn’t one of the experts.
“There’s absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered,” Ebright told the Post. “The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.”
This statement is misleading because the virus could STILL come from a military lab, even it if was not “weaponized.” Sloppy reporters don’t see the distinction.
The Washington Post’s other “expert” for the story was Vipin Narang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This guy isn’t even a real scientist. He’s a “political science” professor. That is, his game is politics.
Like Ebright, Narang doesn’t show up on the Army’s web site about infectious diseases.
The Post’s article about this globally important story wasn’t even written by a reporter. The story byline belongs to Paulina Firozi, a researcher who works on a couple of the newspaper’s newsletters.
Biowarfare Experts Missing From Coverage
In the best herd journalism tradition, several publications parroted the Washington Post story and its “experts” who “debunked” the theory that the virus was the product of Chinese bioweapons research. Among them were USA Today, Business Insider and Yahoo! News.
In Foreign Policy magazine Toronto reporter Justin Ling sharply criticized Dany Shoham, a retired Israeli Defense Forces biowarfare expert. Shoham commented publicly to a few reporters about the Peoples Liberation Army’s highly secret biowarfare program.
Ling’s debunking crusade article only quotes civilians. His favorite is Dr. David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto. Fisman’s 75-page bio doesn’t include any military biowarfare experience. Ling doesn’t cite a military warfare expert of his own. Not one.
In fact, none of these stories debunking the Chinese military lab as a possible originating source quotes an active or retired U.S. military specialist in biowarfare. Not one.
Putting The Blame Where It Belongs
Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist, avoided such sloppy reporting about a month later. He placed the blame where it belongs—with the iron-grip, total-control Chinese Communist Party or CCP.
“Our beef is not with the Chinese people; our problem is with the CCP — its internal repression, its external aggression, and its malign influence in free and open societies.”
Rogin went on to explain the trap reporters fall in when they cringe at China’s accusations of racism: “Chinese officials routinely toss out the racism accusation to rebut criticism of their government. They also accuse the United States of racism to distract from their own horrendously racist policies,
such as interning (sic) (interring) millions of innocent people in Xinjiang on the basis of ethnicity.”
It’s worth considering what some in the Asian media are saying about the coronavirus and the Chinese Communist Party’s role in the global pandemic. Consider this recent segment from a South Korean English-language television network (Airirang TV):
“As the world struggles to contain the new virus, a new speculation from Chinese scientists who believe it may have originated a research facility not far from the Wuhan Fish Market.
While they say more research needs to be done to provide solid proof, such labs are known to contain disease-ridden animals, including hundreds of bats.”
Simone Gao is an anchor for New Tang Television, a global network of the Falun Gong, a major Chinese dissident group. In this comment she’s talking about statements from the Communist Chinese government regarding the coronavirus. Notice she makes a distinction between the Chinese Communist authoritarian regime and China, the country and its people: “Reading between the lines is essential to decoding the Chinese Communist Party’s announcements and policies.
The more likely situation is that the Chinese authorities are orchestrating a coverup.”
We need to find out how the true source of this pandemic. The world’s news media should DEMAND that China go against their standard practice and engage in openness and transparency. If the world’s great newspapers don’t demand this, if the global broadcast news networks don’t demand this, journalism will have a shame that won’t go away.
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