Fox News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn found an anonymous "well-placed insider" at CNN who said in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the Wuhan lab-leak story because he believed it was a "Trump talking point."
"People are slowly waking up from the fog," the insider told Fox News Digital. "It is kind of crazy that we didn't chase it harder."
Somehow, this didn't make Oliver Darcy's CNN "Reliable Sources" newsletter, which railed instead against Tucker Carlson playing video clips from the January 6 riot. Anonymous sources aren't the best sources -- at least for consumers -- but Brian Stelter relentlessly milked anonymous sources inside Fox (or formerly of Fox) for his nasty anti-Fox book Hoax.
That omission could be because Wulfsohn tagged Darcy in his piece for following Zucker's narrative.
On March 28, 2020, CNN’s Oliver Darcy published a story headlined, "Here’s how to debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories from friends and family," that offered advice about dealing with pesky loved ones who didn't believe in mainstream COVID-19 narratives at the time.
"While the coronavirus pandemic has isolated family and friends inside their homes, it has in many cases increased online or over-the-phone communication with loved ones," Darcy wrote.
"But, in some cases, relatives and friends share poor information – whether it is bad science related to how to prevent the virus, debunked rumors about cities being put on lockdown, or conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19. While any strain of misinformation is not ideal, misinformation related to a public health crisis has an especially dangerous element to it," Darcy continued before declaring that "bad information during a public health emergency poses a risk to those who fall victim to it."
Darcy's best defense is this was very early in the lockdown. But clearly CNN and their fellow media liberals thought COVID was the silver bullet to defeat Trump on Election Day (or Election Weeks).
Wulfsohn added a CNN headline from April 2020 reading "Nearly 30% in the US believe a coronavirus theory that’s almost certainly not true" was based on a Pew Research poll taken at the time.
"Its origin is up for debate, but it wasn’t made in a lab," CNN reported. "There’s still much we don’t know about the coronavirus pandemic, but virus experts agree on one piece of its origin story: The virus likely originated in a bat, not in a Chinese lab."
Then came this gem:
On May 5, 2020, CNN published an analysis by Chris Cillizza, who has since been laid off from the network, headlined, "Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump’s theory on the origins of the coronavirus." The piece noted that Trump "has been making the case that the coronavirus originated not in nature but in a lab in Wuhan, China" but insisted Fauci’s claim that the virus likely originated naturally was more accurate.
"Now, before we play the game of ‘he said, he said’ remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it’s not Donald Trump," Cillizza wrote.
It's a little odd that the media outlets that claimed they were all about "the science" were instead willing to dismiss any theory on COVID's origins if it seemed favorable to President Trump.
