Last year as the pandemic swept the nation, and the presidential campaign heated up, the criticisms of then-President Donald Trump grew beyond fever pitch. Virtually everything the man said was met with denunciations and put-downs from the political left, stoked by the liberal news media that didn’t always probe the issue.
When Trump tested positive for COVID-19 in March 2020, he took a two-week regimen of the drug hydroxychloroquine, and praised it as being useful for treating the virus. The media criticism was immediate and vicious, with physicians and scientists, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization, saying that it wasn’t effective for the virus.
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden joined in, saying at a Yahoo News town hall on COVID-19 and food insecurity, “C’mon, man! What is he doing? What in God’s name is he doing?”
And guess what? “A new study published by medRxiv shows hydroxychloroquine, combined with zinc, increased the survival rate of severely ill Wuhan coronavirus patients by 200 percent,” reported Townhall.com.
Early on, Trump suggested that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab in China, rather than from a nearby wet market. Again, the media had a field day ridiculing that suggestion.
It is a known fact that these kinds of labs, wherever they may be, have leaks, so the possibility that Wuhan’s lab could have had one is not crazy. Furthermore, we now know that three researchers at the Wuhan lab suffered from symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in November 2019, before the virus was heard of.
On an episode of CBS "Face the Nation" last month, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, said that the case for COVID-19 originating in a lab has become increasingly likely, and the likelihood that it came from an animal is dwindling.
Trump was also ridiculed and chastised for urging against lockdowns. However, generally, the states with the strictest COVID lockdowns caused huge losses of jobs, but those with less severe restrictions have experienced low levels of unemployment
And the New York Post reported: “The five states with the strictest lockdowns over the last year — Hawaii, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York — have an average unemployment rate of 8.06 percent. In the five states with the lightest restrictions, unemployment sits at just 3.48 percent — lower than the 3.5 percent national rate before the pandemic hit the US.”
“At the same time,” the Post report continued, “ample scientific evidence points to the fact that lockdowns did not save lives, regardless of the media force-feeding its preferred narrative to the public.”
Trump early on initiated Project Warp Speed to quickly create a vaccine. The Washington Post reported Trump’s statement on the vaccine’s early completion at a coronavirus roundtable meeting on March 2, 2020: “We’re moving aggressively to accelerate the process of developing a vaccine. … A lot of good things are happening and they’re happening very fast,” he said.
“Trump is not wrong in saying that scientists are rapidly developing a vaccine to combat the novel coronavirus,” The Post article said. “However, he seems to be overstating when a vaccine will be available to the public. Experts have emphasized that actual deployment of the vaccine is more than a year away, not a few months, as Trump has suggested.”
And a headline on NBC News’ Website read: “Trump says, without evidence, vaccine could be ready by Election Day.”
While the vaccines were not ready by Election Day, they were ready five weeks later, and far ahead of the one-to-ten-year timeline that skeptics expected.
And then there is the situation at Lafayette Square where “peaceful” protesters were attacked with “flash-bang explosions and doused with tear gas,” according to The New York Times. This was supposedly done to clear the way for Trump to walk over to the St. John’s Church for a photo op. That is the same church that the “peaceful” protesters had set afire earlier.
The problem is that none of the country’s finest reporters did their jobs as professionals should. Had they done it right, they would have learned that the clearing of the crowd was decided before Trump even planned on going to the church.
“But an investigation released this week by Interior Department IG Mark Lee Greenblatt says U.S. Park Police and the U.S. Secret Service deemed it necessary to remove protestors from the park on June 1, 2020, in order to install anti-scale fencing,” as reported by Fox News. “The decision was reached after at least 49 U.S. Park Police were injured while policing protests days earlier.”
Other “journalists” also got it wrong. MSNBC’s Joy Reid and CNN's Anderson Cooper also parroted that it happened so Trump could have a photo op.
Though you don’t have to be a big city newspaper or network TV reporter to actually think about what you are doing and seek out accurate information, you might expect those folks would be the ones that would. But, no.
Much or most of the major media outlets relinquished their professional ethics and replaced them with political interests. Feelings trumped integrity.
Honest, objective news journalism is not something we can rely on.
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