The Briefing Room
General Category => Editorial/Opinion/Blogs => Topic started by: PeteS in CA on June 15, 2021, 02:08:13 pm
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'But Trump' Is Not a Valid Excuse for Journalists Not Doing Their Jobs
https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2021/06/13/but-trump-as-an-excuse-for-journalists-not-doing-their-job-is-beyond-ridiculous-n1454302 (https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2021/06/13/but-trump-as-an-excuse-for-journalists-not-doing-their-job-is-beyond-ridiculous-n1454302)
How many more times are journalists going to use “But Trump” as an excuse for not doing their job when it comes to issues that should be apolitical? The most recent example of this is the COVID-19 lab-leak hypothesis. For some reason, Democrats and the legacy media thought it too absurd to consider the idea that a pathogen that causes illness in humans could have leaked from a Level IV laboratory in the same city in which the infection first appeared.
These great thinkers could not see that there were three options their political adversaries were considering. People like Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) were always ready to accept proof of natural origin. However, they were also open to other possibilities—including an accidental release of a wild virus or an engineered virus—and insisted that all options be investigated given the lab’s proximity to the origins of COVID-19.
The last two possibilities seemed to be supported by members of the administration, including the president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The corporate media boiled this down to allegations of a bioweapon and dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. As with everything else, once President Trump, a member of his cabinet, or a Republican who appeared aligned with him said something, our firefighter class lost all ability to deal in nuance.
Our intellectual betters attributed these allegations to some deep-seated xenophobia among Republicans. Based on virtually no scientific evidence, some opinion letters were held up as evidence of a natural origin. The corporate media and social media censored all dissenters. According to the approved expert class, the idea was so thoroughly debunked that anyone who uttered it risked being banned or censored.