Who Are They Working For?

The Washington Examiner posted an article today about the media spin in reporting the news about the coronavirus.

The article reports:

It should not be this easy for Chinese Communist Party propaganda to make its way into major American newsrooms.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, which Chinese lies ensured would become a pandemic, American news media have promoted a number of Beijing-approved talking points, including the one that alleges it is racist to refer to the virus by its country and city of origin. American news media have also accepted at face value a series of dubious claims pushed by Chinese Communist apparatchiks, including the absurd boast that China’s new case numbers have remained essentially flat since late February.

“U.S. has more known cases of coronavirus than any other country,” CNN reported on March 26, its declaration coming in unison with nearly every major news outlet in the United States.

The CNN report, which was published shortly after pandemic trackers placed the number of coronavirus cases in America at more than 85,000, claimed the “U.S. cases piled up … surpassing China and Italy.”

Does anyone actually believe the numbers coming from the Chinese Communist Party reporting the number of coronavirus cases in China?

The article continues:

But the obvious red flags regarding China’s reported data did not slow American newsrooms from declaring the U.S. the leader in reported coronavirus cases without caveats.

This is not the only example of western news media hailing China’s allegedly successful campaign to stem the spread of the coronavirus.

Earlier, even before the U.S. had even supposedly passed the case number milestone, the New York Times published a report on March 18 titled “Its Coronavirus Cases Dwindling, China Turns Focus Outward.”

The article, the chief claim of which has been repeated elsewhere by the New York Times, Bloomberg, and NBC News, goes to great lengths to cast China as a thoughtful, meticulous, proactive, and responsible world leader, one whose contributions to fighting the pandemic have made it a more reliable and responsible superpower compared to the U.S. The New York Times article repeats the Chinese Communist Party’s claim that China’s daily coronavirus cases have dwindled “into the single digits.”

No attempt is made to verify these numbers.

…The U.S. intelligence community determined last week that China has underreported both the total number of coronavirus cases and deaths, all of it in an attempt to conceal the full extent of the pandemic in its country.

Early on, China silenced doctors who raised alarms about the virus, denied access to foreign scientists who could have studied the virus, and falsely claimed that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

There is a massive public relations campaign going on right now from the Chinese Communist Party to downplay the role China played on releasing this virus on the world. The effort is to change the narrative to show China as saving the world from a virus caused by America. This is simply one part of China’s effort to establish itself as the lone superpower in the world–usurping the role currently played by America. The America media does not need to help China in that effort.