While Americans are suffering as people lose their jobs due to the economic impact of the coronavirus, ABC journalists continue showcasing how they care more about President Trump using politically correct terms than anything else.
Just one day after ABC’s White House correspondent Cecilia Vega badgered “racist” Trump during a press conference, Nightline host JuJu Chang tied Trump's use of the term “Chinese virus” to an alleged “rise in outbreaks of racism” and violence against Asian-Americans.
Before getting to her report, Chang sensationalized the few, and mostly mild incidents in her report as a widespread epidemic of hate crimes being Trump’s fault:
“Hate outbreak. Spreading like the virus, bias crimes aimed at Asian-Americans. Fighting racism and the blame game,” Chang touted before playing a clip of Vega and Trump’s hostile exchange.
After a commercial, Chang came back to hype racism directed at Asians:
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, we're seeing the best of humanity, but we're also seeing some of the worst in the form of racist reactions. The Asian community blamed for the virus and increasingly under assault. Now the growing chorus of voices confronting the bias,” she stated.
Chang highlighted one anonymous woman’s charge of being punched and blamed for the virus, along with racial slurs, while walking in midtown Manhattan. Chang immediately tied this assault to President Trump, by playing the clip from the press conference of Trump defending calling COVID-19, the “Chinese virus.”
Chang highlighted a few more, relatively milder incidents of people bullying Asian Americans as evidence that President Trump was starting some kind of racial war.
She turned to “Asian community leader” Gregg Orton touting how “the violence continues to increase,” and Trump’s words “can have dangerous effects,” before adding her own unverified claim that there was a rise in “outbreaks of racism” across the country. To hammer home the point that this was Trump’s fault, she kept interspersing these clips with ones from that press conference of Trump denying racism. ABC even went after Fox News at one point, playing a short clip of host Laura Ingraham saying, “China has blood on its hands.”
The journalist also touted liberal celebrities warning about “senseless violence” before turning to ABC’s own Terry Moran equated a stigma against Asian Americans to the AIDS crisis:
People blamed Spain and the Spaniards for the 1918 influenza epidemic even though it came from America. People blamed gay men for HIV-AIDS although it ended up striking so many people of so many different backgrounds. Weaponized blame. It's a tool of leaders in pandemics to shift responsibility. And it's a way for desperate and frightened people to find some sort of rhyme or reason for what's happening to them.
The real question is, why is ABC working so hard to “shift responsibility” from China?
