After months of hailing China’s COVID-19 response, CNN now questions the data

This style of aggressive, no-nonsense journalism is certainly a welcome change of pace for CNN, which has hailed China’s pandemic response nearly every step of the way, going as far as to parrot nearly verbatim Chinese Communist Party press releases.

“Leaked documents reveal China’s mishandling of the early stages of Covid-19,” reads the headline to the CNN exclusive.

The article’s opening lines read: “In a report marked ‘internal document, please keep confidential,’ local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories.”

“This larger figure was never fully revealed at that time, as China’s accounting system seemed, in the tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the outbreak,” it adds. “The previously undisclosed figure is among a string of revelations contained within 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, shared with and verified by CNN.”

Good on the network for digging into China’s numbers, but it is impossible to read the CNN report and not think of all that it has done this year to fight efforts to hold China accountable for the virus, including promoting the regime’s obviously spurious claim that it has effectively and efficiently defeated the viral outbreak.

Let’s go through a brief history of CNN’s coronavirus reporting:

In March, after the Johns Hopkins University pandemic tracker showed the U.S. coronavirus case count had surpassed 85,000, anchor Chris Cuomo marked the news, claiming even China, where the virus originated, was not as bad off as America.

“The United States now has the most coronavirus cases on Earth, more than Italy, now even more than China where all this started,” he told his viewers.

CNN’s Jim Acosta added elsewhere, “The US has just passed China, a country four times larger In population.”

The network also published a report titled “US has more known cases of coronavirus than any other country.”

The headline and accompanying commentary would be more meaningful and serious had we any reason to believe the figures reported out of China. Only an idiot could have believed the regime’s claim in March that new coronavirus cases increased by only 1,782 since late February. That is just laughable, especially considering China itself said new cases jumped from 920 to roughly 80,000 between Jan. 23 and Feb. 29.

Later in March, as the White House continued to place responsibility for the pandemic on China by referring to COVID-19 as the “foreign virus,” Acosta rushed to the regime’s defense, parroting its talking point that it is bigoted to refer to the virus by its place of origin.

“At one point during the address,” the White House correspondent said of remarks by President Trump that “[Trump] referred to the coronavirus as a ‘foreign virus.’ … Now why the president would go as far as to describe it as a ‘foreign virus’? That is something we’ll also be asking questions about.”

Acosta added: “But it should be pointed out that Stephen Miller, who is an immigration hardliner who advises the president, is one of his top domestic policy advisers and speechwriters, was a driving force in writing this speech. And I think it is going to smack, it’s going to come across to a lot of Americans as smacking of xenophobia to use that kind of term in this speech.”

A separate CNN article published in March also asserted that Trump had adopted the tactic of referring to the virus by its place of origin even despite “push-back from health officials who say the description is misleading and xenophobic.” It is worth noting here that the crusade by the World Health Organization and the free press to get people to stop saying “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese virus” coincides almost exactly with China’s propaganda campaign to rewrite the history of the pandemic, including efforts to get people to stop identifying the virus as coming from Wuhan.

Later, in April, CNN published a report copying almost word for word a Chinese Communist Party press release praising the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s supposed efforts to contain the coronavirus. The CNN report made it a point to criticize the U.S. Navy’s failure to do likewise.

Also in April, CNN relied on Chinese-provided data to report: “For the first time since January, China has reported no new coronavirus deaths.” Again, there has never been a good reason for anyone to believe China’s data.

In May, CNN published a study by the Chinese government claiming Chinese tourists are most excited to visit Wuhan when the pandemic passes and not at all excited to visit the U.S. because of its mishandling of the viral outbreak.

The fact that CNN clips began to appear in Chinese propaganda videos should have been a warning for the cable network that it was maybe doing the dirty work for an authoritarian genocidal regime. But noticing the obvious is apparently too much to ask of the big brains at CNN.

As a brief aside, and as I’ve said elsewhere, “cases” is a largely meaningless and unreliable metric. It could mean a number of things. It could mean, for example, that the pandemic is spreading. However, it could just as well mean more people are testing for the virus. There’s a big difference between an increase in detected cases and an increase in cases. The “cases” metric also doesn’t account for asymptomatic patients. The metrics everyone should be looking at are hospitalizations and deaths. Those actually mean something.

Anyway, good on the U.S. news outlet for getting the scoop on China’s doctored pandemic figures. But don’t expect this style of reporting to become the norm for CNN. After all, it did just publish a report this week bearing the farcical headline: “China has reached a major milestone in ending absolute poverty. But the Communist Party isn’t celebrating yet.”

So, maybe let’s chalk up CNN’s exclusive this week about China’s cooked virus data to this: Even a broken clock is right twice a day.