Washington Post columnist and former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan is calling on the news media to boycott President Trump’s COVID-19 White House press briefings, claiming the chief executive’s penchant for falsehood and hyperbole pose a serious public risk.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian appears to agree.
“More and more each day,” Sullivan writes, “President Trump is using his daily briefings as a substitute for the campaign rallies that have been forced into extinction by the spread of the novel coronavirus. These White House sessions — ostensibly meant to give the public critical and truthful information about this frightening crisis — are in fact working against that end.”
She adds, “Rather, they have become a daily stage for Trump to play his greatest hits to captive audience members.”
Sullivan argues that people who “come in search of life-or-death information” are treated instead to “self-aggrandizement,” “media bashing,” “exaggeration,” and “outright lies.”
Readers are left to wonder why Trump would engage in “media bashing.” Sullivan does not mention how many times reporters have used the briefings to ask the president whether it is racist to refer to the virus’s country of origin. And speaking of wastes of time, Sullivan also neglects to mention the moment that PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor took the president down a rabbit hole during one of his COVID-19 press briefings when she asked him to respond to allegations that an anonymous (of course) White House aide used the term “Kung flu.”
It must have been an oversight on Sullivan’s part.
Shortly after her column published, MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin, who says he is a senior producer but spends almost all of his working hours playing on Twitter, dutifully shared the article on his preferred social media platform, tweeting the headline, “Margaret Sullivan: ‘The media must stop live-broadcasting Trump’s dangerous, destructive coronavirus briefings.’”
As of this writing, Griffin’s tweet has been shared by more than 3,500 social media users, including Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. As in, the Zhao who invented the conspiracy theory alleging the U.S. military brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, the same Zhoa who promoted a conspiracy alleging COVID-19 has been “been here in America for awhile.” As in, the Zhao who has been on the front lines of China’s ultraaggressive, warlike effort to disappear down the memory hole the Chinese Communist Party’s culpability in the spread of the pandemic.
It makes sense that Griffin would tweet Sullivan’s article. After all, he shares anything that reflects poorly on the White House or the Republican Party. The same goes for Zhao, whose eagerness to blame anyone but his government for the COVID-19 pandemic has been a bit too obvious (seriously, just scroll through his Twitter timeline).
Sullivan is obviously not responsible for Zhao’s social media activity. But, when a member of China’s ruling body, the same ruling body that has imprisoned more than one million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps, promotes your call for a media blackout of White House press briefings, maybe it is time to take a step back and reevaluate exactly what it is you are endorsing.
