After he harangued President Donald Trump and his coronavirus task force with blame-game questions during a White House briefing Tuesday afternoon, chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta rushed back to CNN to … compliment the president?
Well, not exactly. It was more like a back-handed compliment.
“Now, I will say in terms of what the president was saying in the briefing room, this was President Trump changing his tune on the coronavirus,” he said to network host Anderson Cooper. “At one point he said it’s not the flu, it’s vicious. That’s after he has compared it to the coronavirus in the past.”
So has the media, though CNN will never admit that:
There has been a genre of “official misinformation” where Washington Post, Wired, USA Today, BuzzFeed, etc have posted dangerously trivial headlines comparing coronavirus to the flu.
Fortunately, NYT has been publishing the science from NEJM, Lancet, CDC, WHO. Credit where due. pic.twitter.com/cbkE4ipq10
— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) February 2, 2020
In fact, some have speculated that the president’s coronavirus/flu comparisons were inspired by the media themselves.
“At one point the president said we’re about to enter a rough two-week period,” Acosta continued. “This is just a stark contrast from what the president was saying a couple of weeks ago and how he’s been describing this coronavirus all along.”
Again, the same is true of the media. Except that in the president’s case, he’s been trying to offer a dose of hope and optimism to keep the American spirit alive through this crisis.
Listen to Acosta’s full remarks below:
“He got off to a late start because of the way he was telling people that this was going to go away, that this was going to miraculously disappear and so on,” he added.
“I tried to press the president on that at a number of points and he said, you know, when he was pressed on this, he said he simply wanted to keep people in good spirits, that he didn’t want to be somebody who was passing along bad news and he wanted to be an optimist and so on.”
First, the American people have also tried to remain hopeful and optimistic. The only ones who’ve chosen to drown in pure pessimism appear to be the media.
Second, Acosta’s claim that the Trump administration “got off to a late start” because of the president is demonstrably false. Both Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx tried repeatedly during the briefing Tuesday to explain this to the CNN correspondent.
Fauci noted that coronavirus mitigation efforts were delayed because of the Communist Party of China’s refusal to be honest about the virus’s real impacts:
And Birx similarly noted that the worldwide “medical community interpreted the Chinese data as that this was serious but smaller than anyone expected” precisely because of China’s refusal to be honest.
Listen:
(Source: Fox News)
Neither Fauci’s remarks nor Birx’s remarks were mentioned by Acosta or any of his colleagues at CNN, which has been hellbent on blaming the global coronavirus pandemic solely on the president of the United States.
“But I have to tell you, Anderson, I’ve never seen President Trump like this,” Acosta’s back-handed compliment concluded. “I know people might say, well, you know, I can’t ever trust him. He’s a phony and so on. People may say that.”
“But Anderson, I have to tell you sitting in that room that close to him, I’ve never seen President Trump like this. And I think to some extent he is scared right now, Anderson, and we could all feel that in the room.”
Leave it to Acosta to “compliment” the president while also deriding him as “phony” and “scared” …
What’s most troublesome about the rhetoric by Acosta and his peers at CNN is how one-sided it’s been and will forever continue to be.
The evidence makes it clear that both congressional Democrats and members of the mainstream press repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus threat.
Nancy didn’t think this was of any import… pic.twitter.com/znoOPBRyg4
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) April 1, 2020
Case in point: In late February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi toured San Francisco’s Chinatown to encourage people to still congregate there despite growing concerns about the virus.
“You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city. We know that there is concern about tourism all throughout the world, but we think it’s very safe to be in Chinatown. I hope that others will come,” she said at the time.
Watch:
Pelosi Accuses #PresidentTrump Of Delay
While SHE Encouraged Constituents To
“Come To Chinatown”ATTN Pelosi:
Before You Lecture Us About The #WuhanVirus
STOP Your Deranged Voters From Crapping
On Your Streets#WuhanCoronaVirus
pic.twitter.com/8TQ5Np7Uf7— Dr. Marty Fox 🇺🇸 (@DrMartyFox) April 1, 2020
Yet this has never been mentioned by CNN, as it seems the network is eager to avoid any story that’ll hurt its #OrangeManBad narrative.
The network has also never written a single word about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio purposefully riding the subway early last month to “calm coronavirus fears,” as reported by the New York Post.
“De Blasio picked up the A at Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, and rode it a single stop to High Street in Brooklyn Heights, en route to the neighborhood’s Office of Emergency Management headquarters, across the street from the station,” the outlet noted.
But stories like this will never be touted by Acosta and his peers because to share them would mean to acknowledge that nobody had known that the coronavirus would be as deadly and devastating as it has since become.
Suffice it to say, were CNN to acknowledge this reality, it’d have no other option but to replace its #OrangeManBad narrative with an #EverybodyBad narrative. And as it stands, the anti-Trump network seems to have no interest in doing such.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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