“News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all.”
– Gay Talese
False news can be both dangerous and motivating. America might not be the United States today without false news. A rumor developed in Virginia that King George was plotting to enslave Americans.
Another one surfaced that he was preparing to force all colonial churches to adopt the doctrine of the Church of England. As these conspiracy theories spread throughout the colonies they tipped the scales toward revolution. For those sitting on the fence, these rumors pushed them off the top.
False news has destroyed institutions, eradicated knowledge, restrained liberty and has shattered lives. Partisan media augmented with a hyperbolic internet has enabled the far left to spread false information. This marriage of dissidents was consummated in hell. The alliance of these powerful and dangerous information vehicles easily influences the mindset of the gullible. By replacing facts with leftist opinions and inculcation, they can eradicate even the most conspicuous empirical truths.
The maturation of any rogue regime relies on the conveyance of bad information and bad thinking. By stoking paranoia, they profit from mistrust and promote bad policies to support their politics, and subjugate the masses. They utilize world wide information systems to formulate public opinion that supports their dogmatic agenda. Through crisis exploitation, they create dependence to mitigate our self-reliant independence.
“The news and the truth are not the same thing.”
– Walter Lippmann
Nothing in media history has been so arrantly reported than events that brought about the COVID-19 pandemic. When the Chinese revealed the 19 cases of an unknown pneumonia in Wuhan in December 2019, few world media groups reported the story. The Wuhan Evening News, the local newspaper, didn’t do a feature article on it for two weeks. The World Health Organization didn’t take notice of it until mid-January since Communist media censors camouflaged reports about this virus.
Every quality reporter is aware of their need to check the credibility of a source before they put their quill to parchment. When Beijing could no longer cover up COVID-19 and bits and pieces of details leaked out to other nations, news-starved reporters jumped on it like a vulture on road-kill. And they have been doing this with each daily headline around the globe. The worse they make it sound, the better the ratings, since:
“Bad news travels fast. Good news takes the scenic route.”
– Doug Larson
Every reporter knows Communists can’t be trusted to retell a Grimm’s Fairy Tale accurately. Yet liberal media hacks have had a field day playing the blame game. Their reporting has consisted of a re-fabrication of second-hand information. They took China’s distorted news data and turned the COVID crisis into a forum of leftist opinions and projections to criticize the Trump administration.
The first lesson we learn in journalism school is fact checking. The second is reporting facts without opinions. World nations have depended on credible information to react responsibly since the first Greek messenger was slain for delivering bad tidings. At a time the world needed facts to ward off what could become a pandemic, few media giants explored the breadth of this virus, and possible effects it could have on the world. Their failures allowed a local epidemic to turn into a pandemic.
The noblest act a journalist can engender is to admit they made a mistake and reported erroneous information and reprint the truth. This has been the case since the first tabloid was dispatched in the first village square. Instead of admitting they were asleep at the wheel when the virus first was discovered and revealing they used bogus data from China about its severity, they blamed Donald Trump for their ineptness?
“We cannot make good news out of bad practice.”
– Edward R. Murrow
When people started questioning the myriad of opinions and multitude of discrepancies in fatalities by different news sources, liberal politicians and news organizations swayed public opinion away from their negligence by falsely blaming the Trump administration for drastic cuts in the budget at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s anti-pandemic work force. Yet, not one reporter wrote that the director of the CDC’s Center for Global Health has continually said that is not true.
If reporters had done their job when COVID-19 first appeared, they would not have to work overtime to dig up old data on the CDC to cover up their arbitrary reporting. They unearthed outdated reports from early 2018 that Congress had drastically reduced grants to prevent infectious-disease epidemics. The Global Health Security Agenda, between 60 nations in 2014, was funded one time by Congress to fight the Ebola epidemic for five years. That ran out at the end of the year in 2019.
On Feb. 24, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking from the Senate floor, claimed the Trump administration made “drastic cuts to the global health division at CDC.” And Senator Chris Murphy ranted: “President Obama set up anti-pandemic programs in 47 vulnerable countries, to protect us against something like this. Experts begged Trump not to cut them.” Both Schumer and Murphy admitted they read this in the New York Times and heard it from Joy Behar, a host on ABC TV’s “The View.” When the CDC released a statement that those cuts were avoided, it was never reported.
According to CDC’s associate director, Maureen Bartee, “CDC did not cut back its workforce at all.” CDC received additional funding for global health security from Congress for essential public health capacity development in the four key areas started in 2014 with the one-time supplemental funds: surveillance, laboratory systems, workforce development, emergency management and response. She said, “We focus on these links to ensure nations are prepared to respond to disease threats.”
Aldous Huxley wrote, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” It is a fact China hid this virus until Beijing was forced to reveal it. It took months to get facts from China on treating it. By the time we learned its severity, it had become a pandemic. The media reported half truths from unreliable sources until real facts were revealed. By then it was too late for a meā culpā since they had teamed up with the left to discredit Trump for not reacting to something he didn’t know existed. They turned China’s cover-up into a problem America should have solved for the world.
The press is accountable to the people. They have an obligation to report the facts, not half truths. They did not fulfill their obligation to investigate and divulge accurate facts about COVID-19. Large media groups have money and influence and can pay sources for information to scoop the smaller under-published news outlets and the independent journalists. If they had put as much energy into gathering factual data about this new virus when it first was reported in Wuhan, China, as they have chastising everyone else for their amateurish reporting, it might not have turned into a pandemic.
Only time will tell how world-wide news consumers react to this.
"If you can manipulate the news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation unfairly.”
– Mario Cuomo
* This article was originally published here
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