CNN Banned All Reporting on Lab Leak Theory Because it was "Racist"

Paul Thacker in the DisInformation Chronicle reports on an internal survey conducted by leading U.S. news outlet CNN that found the network’s COVID-19 coverage was the third leading cause of distrust in it behind liberal bias and “the Chris Cuomo situation”.

“The only people likely surprised that an internal CNN report found CNN’s pandemic coverage was awful are CNN reporters and their colleagues bitching on Twitter,” he remarks. “To anyone outside a newsroom, CNN’s pandemic failures have been apparent for years.”

New light was shone on these failures last week when the Atlantic revealed that CNN had banned all discussion of the lab leak theory of Covid origins on air, fearing that it was a “xenophobic gambit that endangered Asian Americans”.

Thacker reviews some of CNN’s worst Covid-era offences, and doesn’t pull his punches.

A year ago, I reported that CNN’s science writer Maggie Fox did a copy/paste of Pfizer’s press release announcing the results of their COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial. Maggie Fox isn’t a name familiar to most readers, but while she was reporting at CNN her haphazard article on Pfizer’s clinical trial influenced CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. In March of last year, Walensky admitted that CNN’s faulty reporting misled her to believe that Pfizer’s vaccine was going to fix all the problems with the pandemic.

Below, you can view passages of Pfizer’s press release next to Maggie Fox’s copy-paste CNN article.

But it wasn’t just vaccine reporting where Maggie Fox and CNN reporters failed. Journalists promoting the Atlantic story on Twitter aren’t bothering to note that the Atlantic reported that former CNN CEO Zucker silenced reporting that discussed a possible lab accident in Wuhan, China.

Licht emphasize that although he would show employees grace for certain missteps, he had no tolerance for efforts to chill reporting on controversial topics. He noted that Zucker, fearing the Covid ‘lab leak theory’ was a xenophobic gambit that endangered Asian Americans, had essentially banned discussion of the topic on the air.

How’s that for CNN journalism?

But even if the Atlantic hadn’t exposed CNN’s ban, the bias was obvious to anyone reading CNN news or following their science reporter Maggie Fox. Shortly after the pandemic began, CNN ran a misleading story denigrating the 30% of Americans who believed the virus could have come from a lab.

According to the fact checkers and virologists CNN contacted, average American’s view that a Wuhan accident could have started the pandemic was ‘misinformation’.

Months later, this narrative that fact checkers and virologists constructed out of thin air began falling apart.

In the fall of 2020, emails released under public information requests showed that scientists had orchestrated a public disinformation campaign to confuse Americans about dangerous virus research happening in Wuhan, China. These emails exposed Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance orchestrating an influential February 2020 statement in the Lancet, calling the idea of a lab leak a “conspiracy”.

While getting people to sign on to the Lancet essay, Daszak emailed that the statement should “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”.

Despite virologists getting their pants pulled down, Maggie Fox doubled down at CNN.

Like most science writers, Fox ignored virologists’ own emails and constructed her articles around quotes from virologists with undisclosed conflicts of interest. For example, Fox used Tulane University virologist Robert Garry as a cudgel to attack former CDC Director Robert Redfield, who had made statements that he was concerned the pandemic started from a lab accident.

But this article was full of holes. Redfield is an infectious disease expert with a top secret security clearance, who was basing his assessment from a review of the science, intelligence documents and consultations with intelligence experts. Meanwhile, Robert Garry was hiding what he really thought.

A year and a half later, Megyn Kelly confronted Robert Garry, in an interview about his own emails which showed he had been very concerned at the beginning of the pandemic that the virus might have come out of a lab. Kelly’s questions left Garry sputtering up responses, and should be required viewing for Maggie Fox and other science writers.

Nonetheless, Maggie Fox continued with a series of articles and tweets, repetitively pointing against a possible lab accident. Why? That’s what she and all the other science writers were doing. Science writers call up their sources and write, they don’t report.

Worth reading in full.