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March 23, 2020

On Sunday, Jake Tapper stood in for America’s biased media conglomerate

By Andrea Widburg

Once upon a time, Jake Tapper, although leaning left, was a reasonably balanced reporter. The Trump years, however, have destroyed his ability to separate fact from opinion. Now, he’s as bad as any other mainstream media reporter. And if you doubt that statement, you only need to look at his conduct on Sunday, when he allowed himself to be used twice as a conduit for incorrect, left-leaning material.

It started early in the morning when Tapper interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the avatar of the modern Democrat Party, about New York’s shortage of masks and ventilators. During the interview, Ocasio-Cortez repeated the Politico lie that President Trump called coronavirus a “hoax.” As the video shows, though, what Trump said was that the hoax was the media’s politicized attacks against him through the vehicle of the coronavirus, just as they attacked him about Russia and Ukraine.

When Ocasio-Cortez repeated this debunked lie, Tapper sat there, blinking like moronically, saying nothing:

After being called upon for letting Occasional-Cortez get away with this defamatory remark, Tapper had the gall to defend himself by claiming that Trump was lying, not about coronavirus, but about the fact that the media was attacking him:

Apparently, Tapper hasn’t been watching Trump’s now-daily press conferences, during which the media is often more intent upon arguing with and attacking the president than they are on getting facts for the American people. Moreover, Tapper also seemingly missed that Trump was the only leader in the world to take the Chinese Virus so seriously that he closed America’s borders to China at the end of January. Then, the media attacked Trump as a racist; now, the media accuses him of being passive and ineffectual.

Showing that Tapper's abysmal excuse for allowing Occasional-Cortex to lie wasn't an anomaly, he was at it again Sunday evening. On Sunday, Reuters published a half-truth story that implied that America could have stopped the coronavirus if Trump hadn’t eliminated a CDC position that had an American representative in Beijing to monitor epidemic outbreaks. Both the Reuters’ headline and the first fifteen paragraphs focused tightly on that missing CDC person. Much of the article’s content read like standard Chinese propaganda.

It was only in the sixteenth paragraph that the truth emerged. Because the position was in Beijing and China deliberately suppressed information about what was happening in Wuhan, an American presence in Beijing wouldn’t have made any difference:

One disease expert told Reuters he was skeptical that the U.S. resident adviser would have been able to get earlier or better information to the Trump administration, given the Chinese government’s suppression of information.

“In the end, based on circumstances in China, it probably wouldn’t have made a big difference,” Scott McNabb, who was a CDC epidemiologist for 20 years and is now a research professor at Emory University. “The problem was how the Chinese handled it. What should have changed was the Chinese should have acknowledged it earlier and didn’t.”

Despite being a reporter, Tapper didn’t bother to read the whole Reuters report. Instead, he retweeted it, putting his professional imprimatur on a half-truth that functioned as a lie:

And once again, when called upon it, Tapper offered a pathetic defense:

People on Twitter were quick to point out that Tapper is a weasel. The following is just one of many examples:

As noted above, Tapper is not the only failed journalist out there. It’s just that his one day output represents what all the mainstream "journalists" are doing. At day’s end, it was President Trump who best summed up what’s happening out there in Media Land:

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