The Washington Post continues to ruin its reputation by relying on a mix of a Soros-affiliated organization, the UN and the ADL to claim criticism of China’s handling of the coronavirus is racist.
The Post’s story is headlined “As the coronavirus spreads, so does online racism targeting Asians, new research shows.” The article argued that “Fears of the coronavirus have fueled rising anti-Chinese sentiment online as a combination of traditional slurs and new terms such as ‘kungflu’ conflate the pandemic with ethnic and national identity, say social media researchers who tracked surging expressions of hostility for papers published Wednesday evening.” [Emphasis added.]
The story cited research from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI). The outlet also cited separately published research and another study to help drive home this narrative. The Post stated that the leader of the second study, University of Maryland Baltimore County Professor of Psychology Charissa Cheah, “said anti-Chinese language such as ‘kungflu’ and ‘batsoup’ have their roots in historically racist tropes that have long been used to denigrate Asian Americans and cast them as foreigners no matter how long they have lived in the U.S.” [Emphasis added.]
NCRI’s co-founder/director, Joel Finkelstein helps “turn tools for social science into tools for social justice,” according to the organization’s “About” page.
NCRI lists liberal billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the lefty Anti-Defamation League, The United Nations, and the Charles Koch Foundation as affiliated organizations.
Finkelstein’s group, said The Post, “documented a rise of conspiracy theories featuring both anti-Chinese sentiment and words such as ‘bioweapon’ on 4chan’s notoriously racist ‘Politically Incorrect’ message board and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter, according to a white paper published Wednesday evening.”
Buried in the ninth paragraph was the paper’s underlying perspective: Sinophobia was legitimized by President Donald Trump. In other words, The Post appears to have resorted to the liberal media default narrative: it’s Trump’s fault.
“‘The research does not seek to evaluate whether Trump’s comments [calling the coronavirus the “Chinese Virus” on Twitter] caused the surge of ethnic slurs on 4chan, but ‘that was a legitimizing moment,’ said Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University who studies online hate,” reported The Post.
The Post went after Twitter hashtags like #ChinaVirus, #ChinaLiedPeopleDied and #BlameChina as indicators of “rising hostility towards China.” The outlet cited Clemson University Professor Darren Linvill, and summarized his comments to make pro-Trump Twitter accounts appear racist by saying use of the hashtag #ChineseVirus was “particularly prominent among accounts that regularly support Trump on Twitter.”
Perhaps The Post was busy trying to figure out how to further blast the president when Bloomberg News released its April 1 story headlined, “China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says.”
