by Tristan Justice | The Federalist
CNN claimed to break big news. According to leaked documents from Chinese authorities verified by six independent experts including a forensic analysis of the files, China deliberately underreported the severity of its early coronavirus outbreak in the Hubei province.
The novel Wuhan coronavirus, named after the Hubei capital that saw its first major outbreak, would later spread across the globe. It has infected more than 63 million people and killed more than 1.46 million, according to Johns Hopkins University, which doesn’t include those who died from draconian lockdowns. And make no mistake, people have died from the lockdowns.
According to CNN, China publicly reported 2,478 new coronavirus cases on Feb. 10 in the Hubei province. Internal documents show, however, that 5,918 new cases had actually been detected.
The problem with CNN’s supposedly blockbuster reporting, however, is that it revealed nothing the honest news consumer didn’t already know, and which The Federalist had already reported for months, including here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The Federalist was smeared and jeered for steadfastly reporting the truth that the novel virus originated in Wuhan, China and that China’s claims about the virus couldn’t be trusted based on the communist regime’s documented pattern of lies. For refusing to back down from the truth under politicized pressure, The Federalist and other right-leaning outlets were constantly attacked.
For months it’s been brazenly obvious that China was deliberately underreporting its cases of the Wuhan virus. The Chinese government lied about every aspect of the global crisis, including its origin, while silencing whistleblowers who sounded the alarm, hiding crucial information from health experts, and pushing the World Health Organization into lying about the nature of the virus itself. At the pandemic’s onset, China again proved it cannot be trusted with its own statistics.
Subsequent reporting in April on a classified brief delivered to the White House later showed the U.S. intelligence community believed China was fabricating its public figures on the virus. Hard evidence that was public at the time supported the intelligence community’s claims.
That includes a report from the government-funded nonprofit Radio Free Asia finding the death toll in Wuhan to be far higher than the 3,000 deaths the Chinese government was claiming at the time. Examining funeral home capacity and recent urn shipments in the Hubei province, Radio Free Asia found that deaths attributable to the virus actually totaled somewhere around 46,800 in March. Above all else, believing China’s numbers defied common sense.
By early April, China began lifting lockdown restrictions and reported artificially lowered cases and deaths to the rest of the world struggling to contain a virus it knew practically nothing about, thanks in part to China’s refusal to share honest knowledge.
“U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours,” NBC News tweeted on April 7. “Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported.” These falsehoods from China were used by corporate media as a cudgel against Trump, incredibly claiming that a communist country was doing better than the freest country in the world based on taking China’s doctored numbers at face value.
NBC was far from alone in spewing this Chinese propaganda.
Perhaps no American outlet however, carried more water for the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party than CNN itself, despite breaking news undermining its own reporting months later.
In fact, the weight CNN carried for the CCP even led Federalist editor Kylee Zempel to pen a piece headlined, “Who Wrote This Pro-Communist China Article? CNN or Xi Jingping?”
Several other major American media outlets joined the effort lauding China’s triumph based on fabricated figures while condemning President Donald Trump for blaming the virus on the east Asian adversary.
The same outlets that had used the phrase “Wuhan coronavirus” then began attacking the president for saying “Wuhan coronavirus” after the Chinese Communist Party successfully weaponized the United States’s woke media elites to deflect its responsibility for the virus they released to the world by calling the term racist.
Even though it’s common practice to name novel diseases after a population or site of its first major outbreak, activist journalists spent previous time during White House briefings to launch their favorite line of attack by calling the president racist.
China is broadly known to inflame racial tensions within its foreign adversaries as a form of information warfare and agitprop. The Chinese government carries out literal ethnic cleansing programs on minorities within China, and to cover up its sins attacks the United States as racist, even though Americans are among the least racist people in the world, according to global surveys.
And U.S. media eagerly gobbled the bait once again, freely assisting a U.S. adversary in attacking their own nation’s social harmony and ability to focus on the vulnerable during a global pandemic.