- PJ MEDIA - ROBERT SPENCER - MAR 6, 2023 -
It has been clear for a long time that CNN is not actually a news organization but a far-Left propaganda outlet disseminating the views of the Democrat Party leadership. Nonetheless, it continues with a straight face to call itself “the most trusted name in news,” despite the mounting evidence that anyone who actually trusts it is either terminally naïve or indefatigably Maoist.
The latest indication that anyone who is looking for genuine facts should look anywhere but CNN comes from the revelation that former CNN top dog Jeff Zucker was so full of hatred for Donald Trump and his followers that he ordered his hapless staff not to look into the theory that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak. Why? Because it was a “Trump talking point.”
Yes, the lab-leak theory turned out to be true, but CNN is not in the business of presenting truth. Nor has the network been chastened by the growing public awareness of the fact that it is just the opposite of what it claims to be. A glance at CNN’s front page on Monday morning showed that the Leftist propaganda is flowing just as copiously as ever. The lead story is “She was weeks away from maternity leave. Then Elon Musk took over.” See? CNN wants you to absorb the idea that supporting the freedom of speech makes you mean and heartless.
Under “Today in Politics,” we get “Trump delivers wildly inaccurate speech at CPAC.” Let the readers make up their own minds? Not at CNN! Underneath that is “Analysis: DeSantis wants to turn America into Florida,” as if that’s a bad thing. Then there are CNN’s fearless hard-news stories, such as “Bruce Willis’ wife begs paparazzi not to yell at him in the street.” So you see, it’s not all far-Left twaddle; much of it is scandal sheet celebrity-chasing stuff. This is CNN, just over halfway through the first (and we hope the only) term of the Biden regime they worked so hard to install.
CNN doesn’t just publish whatever will make Trump and other patriots look bad, as well as whatever will make the increasingly authoritarian Biden regime look good; it has now come to light that it also spiked one of the most important stories of the last several years, for the sole reason that it was something that the hated Trump was claiming. Fox News reported Monday that “in the early months of the pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the lab-leak story because he believed it was a ‘Trump talking point,’ according to a well-placed CNN insider.”
The CNN insider added: “People are slowly waking up from the fog. It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.” Well, actually, it’s not crazy at all. As long as Trump was saying that COVID originated with a lab leak in China, it was absolutely guaranteed that CNN would say the opposite and insist that those who held to the lab-leak theory were tinfoil-hatted nutjobs who refused to believe The Science. Fox notes that “throughout Zucker’s tenure as CNN’s chief, he pulled what was once widely seen as a straight-news organization to an anti-Trump operation.” The allegedly truthful network “bent over backwards to knock down what former President Trump and members of his administration said lending credibility to the lab-leak theory.” This involved publishing stories that dismissed the lab-leak theory as crazy nonsense that only people who (in CNN’s view) were already so stupid as to support Trump would believe.
And so “on March 28, 2020, CNN’s Oliver Darcy published a story headlined, ‘Here’s how to debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories from friends and family,’ that offered advice about dealing with pesky loved ones who didn’t believe in mainstream COVID-19 narratives at the time.” Darcy wrote sanctimoniously that “while any strain of misinformation is not ideal, misinformation related to a public health crisis has an especially dangerous element to it.” CNN anchor John Vause likewise called the lab-leak theory “misinformation,” in a discussion with Dr. Fauci, no less. Fauci sagely replied that “theories that are not based on evidence and facts often can really mislead people.”
Here again we see how the Left’s “misinformation” gambit works. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” are not information that is false; it’s information that doesn’t adhere to the Leftist line. That’s why the Biden regime’s abortive “Disinformation Governance Board” was as insidious as it was authoritarian. CNN can’t dismiss the lab-leak theory as “misinformation” anymore, but that doesn’t mean it has decided to start reporting the truth. It will just move on to newer Leftist propaganda.