Talk about a lack of self-awareness.
In a report this week acknowledging China’s disinformation campaign to absolve the Chinese Communist Party of any culpability for its mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, CNN also repeated the Beijing-approved talking point that it is racist to refer to the disease by its city and country of origin.
CNN’s story, which bears the idiotic headline “Blame game escalates between US and China over coronavirus disinformation,” gets it right when it talks about “Beijing’s disinformation push” and the Chinese officials who “continue to overtly spread false and misleading information about the virus.” The story is also correct when it reports that Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao is responsible for the “conspiracy theory that the coronavirus did not originate [in] China and may have been brought there by the US Army.”
The report goes on to highlight “China’s disinformation efforts” and “the increasing number of false claims from Chinese officials over the last month.”
In fact, the report uses the word “disinformation” at least 10 times to describe China’s efforts to win the COVID-19 narrative. Yet CNN still cannot resist the urge to claim it is racist for President Trump and his allies to refer to the virus by its city and country of origin.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the report reads, “along with other Trump allies that include incoming chief of staff Mark Meadows and Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, have also attempted to reinforce the idea that the virus originated in China by publicly referring to it as the ‘Wuhan virus’ or ‘China virus.’”
The report adds, “That characterization has also been recently adopted by Trump himself despite push-back from health officials who say the description is misleading and xenophobic. Last week, a photographer spotted Trump changing the word ‘corona’ to ‘Chinese’ in his prepared remarks.”
These aforementioned health officials, by the way, are employees of the World Health Organization, which has spent the entire crisis covering for the Chinese Communist Party. Worse, WHO, like China, dropped the ball on COVID-19 back when the virus first emerged in late 2019.
Taipei officials say they told the health group in December about “the risk of human-to-human transmission.” However, these officials say, WHO did not pass on the information to other countries. WHO was also the organization that spread Chinese propaganda in January when it posted a notice on social media that read, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”
Lastly, and I am sure it is a complete coincidence, but it is worth noting that WHO’s crusade 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.
So, you will forgive me if I am not exactly ready to take WHO seriously when it lectures people about whether it is racist to refer to the virus that originated in China and spread due to the overwhelming incompetence of the Chinese Communist Party as the “Chinese virus,” especially as the lecture comes from an organization whose response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been to put China’s interests before all else.
CNN is ahead of the curve when it acknowledges Beijing’s propaganda campaign to rewrite history. But that makes it that much worse when it parrots the line that it is racist to refer to the virus in such a way that reminds everyone that China is solely responsible for the pandemic.
