The Fake News Industry and Trump’s COVID-19 Diagnosis

President Donald Trump arrives at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center by helicopter, in Bethesda, Md., Oct. 2, 2020. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

Commentary

When Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016, he earned the ire and eternal enmity of the mainstream news industry by calling their product “fake news.” He has been made to pay for using that all-too-accurate term ever since his election.

However, the “fake” part of fake news has never been so obvious as in what the mainstream news industry has been peddling since it was announced that President Trump and his wife, Melania, had tested positive for the CCP virus.

After hasty and insincere expressions of sympathy, the mainstream news reports immediately turned to blaming the president for holding campaign rallies and accusations that he has infected gullible supporters.

Now, if the last few months—since the death of George Floyd—had not seen millions of people in the streets, chanting, sweating, looting, and participating in every form of violent anarchy—with the full support of the Democrat-controlled mainstream news industry—those accusations might have some credibility.

But the fact is that, with the encouragement of the mainstream media and Democratic Party leaders—who often participated in the sweaty protests—the streets have been filled with sometimes unmasked people crowded close to one another and enthusiastically doing their thing, viruses flying everywhere.

These energetic protesters, looters, rioters, and arsonists gather in apartments, coffee shops, bars, and other enclosed spaces before and after their “protests.” The energy level is high. Saliva, sweat, and other body fluids are exchanged. Often people are squashed together in what seems like a giant blob of humanity. Viruses fly from their mouths.

And they get within inches of the police and bystanders they don’t like. They get in the faces of people trying to enjoy an evening at a sidewalk cafe, drink their drinks, and yell in their faces, with spit and viruses flying.

And exactly how many reports have there been about the CCP virus spread implications of the millions of people who have taken to the streets? There was one early on preposterously asserting that such street activity doesn’t spread the virus—as long as the protests are done in the name of anti-racism. There was another public letter that went even further—stating that even if the street protest activity did spread the virus, the anti-racism cause was so important that spreading the virus shouldn’t concern any of us. Amazingly, that public letter was signed by 1,000 medical professionals.

The media appeared to give their full support to the potential “super-spreader” protests that took place for months from coast to coast.

So now we have the president berated by that same media for being out in public, while the mainstream news industry blithely ignores the only-too-obvious fact that a million other street protesters, rioters, looters, and arsonists have been potentially infecting the rest of the country for the last four months with not a word of criticism from the supposedly “objective journalists” who report what’s laughingly referred to as “news.”

And the supposedly objective journalists, who make the huge leap from months of completely ignoring the implications of a million protesters potentially infecting the nation to an infected president who came into contact with a tiny fraction of that number, don’t pause for even a minute to consider their staggering hypocrisy. Instead, they blindly rattle on, locked in their low-information bubble.

President Trump dared to give a name to this kind of disinformation. He called it “fake news.” For that he has been pilloried by a news industry that grows more hypocritical and corrupt by the day. The accusations from the mainstream news industry that President Trump put others in danger, while ignoring the indisputable fact that street protesters have been potentially spreading the CCP virus throughout the land every day for months, is proof that the term “fake news” is well deserved.

Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge and a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.