Posted on 12/17/2020 7:49:16 AM PST by Kaslin
Fact checks on the United States' COVID vaccine timeline expose how outlets like NBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are willing to attack American aspirations to score political points.
Long gone are the days of Snopes assuring readers there isn’t a million dollars waiting in a Nigerian bank account for them. Distant are the happier times when fact-checks assured us there was no hook-handed hitchhiker killing our grandparents on the local highway.
Today, we see an alliance between corporate media and corporate tech titans to squelch debate, silence conservatives, and literally censor regular Americans, dissenting scientists, newspaper competitors, and even the president of the United States. No longer even content with simply nitpicking and undermining debate, the fact checks on the United States’ COVID vaccine timeline expose how outlets like NBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are willing to attack American dreams and aspirations to score political points.
“Trump’s inaccurate coronavirus vaccine timeline,” read a Washington Post headline that has since been updated to replace “inaccurate” with “accelerated.”
“Trump appears to be expediting the vaccine development process, misrepresenting how fast a vaccine will be available to the public in fighting the novel coronavirus,” the article claimed, citing leftist media’s unassailable hero, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“As the United States and the rest of the world prepare for the novel coronavirus to continue spreading,” they continued, “it’s important to share factual information about the virus and methods to combat it.”
“This is misleading,” The New York Times “fact-checked” after the president said the companies the United States is working with are “going to have vaccines, I think, relatively soon.“
“Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this year, Trump says,” reads an NBC headline. “Experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right.”
Were newspapers wrong to ask questions about Operation Warp Speed, to push for transparency, and to ask experts in the field what they thought? Certainly not, but “fact-checks” are rarely journalism these days, when outlets like USA Today hire college interns to earn money from Facebook by censoring media they dislike.
More to the point, the above three articles aren’t even checks on facts — they’re checks on hopeful goals, they’re checks on our national aspirations in the face of immense challenges, they’re checks on what the corporate media and their expert friends think America is capable of achieving.
“This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal,” one American president said in a 1961 address to a joint session of Congress: “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth
President Kennedy Challenges NASA to Go to the Moon
That president was John F. Kennedy, and just eight years later President Richard Nixon joined the country in watching the Apollo 11 land safely on the moon.
Was Kennedy’s challenge visionary? Was it aspirational? Was it an American dream? Yes on all three, yet you will find nary a 1961 New York Times fact-check calling his statement misleading because we might not succeed on the timeline he’d set.
Outside of even fact checks, imagine for a moment the newspaper headlines he would have generated if his speech were given today by a Republican when the left was banking an election on his failure?
“President Kennedy says moon landing will be coming by the end of the decade, despite contrary evidence,” CNBC 1961 might have written.
“Moon Landing in 10 Years? Experts Urge Reality Check,” Bloomberg 1961 could have reported.
“Kennedy promises moon landing by 1970, but scientists doubt it,” a 1961 Washington Post might have chimed in.
If those just slightly altered headlines sound absurd, it’s because they are framed around how foolish the paper thinks the president is as opposed to the more realistic and honest take that our nation had embarked on a great but also very difficult mission. As actual 59-year-old headlines read, the latter was still the norm in 1961.
“We Stand For Freedom,” the real New York Times headline read on May 26, 1961. “We stand for freedom and must be willing to pay the price that stand implies,” the article began. “This was the crux of President Kennedy’s far-ranging speech to Congress yesterday. After four months of stocktaking, the President has now put forth, in low key but nonetheless effectively, a detailed blueprint of the New Frontier’s policy to meet the historic challenges we face.”
“JFK Shoots For Moon: He Asks Funds For Bold, New Effort,” The Miami News echoed
“JFK: We Must Be 1st In Space & Here Too,” The New York Daily News reported.
Much has changed in politics and in media since those days, and it’s difficult to compare them on many aspects. Still, the differences here illustrate what many Americans have already come to believe about our corporate media: They hate President Donald Trump so much they were willing to undermine our country and our dreams to defeat him.
Sadly, they might have won on this front, but fortunately, they were caught. And unless Americans see real, substantive, and unlikely change, half of us will never trust them again.
Still waiting on what our Defense Department or State Department is going to do to the ChiComs for releasing their ChiCom virus on the United States and the world.
I mean other than Manchurianjoe kissing Xi’s keister.
Good point.
Does anyone believe the Post or the Times?
NO!..but they do serve a purpose by being a “Reverse Fact Check” of sorts......i.e....Election was fair and above board = it wasnt!
In 9/11, 3000 people were killed. This resulted in Dubya starting Iraq war, which resulted in trillions of US taxpayer dollars being spent, thousands of US soldiers killed, millions of Iraqis killed in the war and following instability. This resulted everybody in US getting surveilled by NSA and onerous searches everytime you tried to board a plane. Quite a lot was done in response to those 3000 killed.
When the Wuhan Flu started (probably a leak from their bioweapons facility at the Wuhan Institue of Virology), China first lied about it and tried to downplay it. They banned internal flights from Wuhan but allowed flights to go internationally from Wuhan.
Now as of this writing, we have 300000 dead in the US and rising. Many lost their jobs, their businesses. Many with long-term health complications. Not minimizing 9/11 but this is way worse than 9/11. And what has been done in response? Hardly anything. Corporations mostly continue to do business in China merrily, reaping huge rewards for CEOs and Wall Street. Mainstream press is mostly silent on China while writing hitpieces daily on Trump. Politicians, controlled by said corporations, don’t talk about China.
Why are more people not furious about this?
“Today, we see an alliance between corporate media and corporate tech titans to squelch debate, silence conservatives, and literally censor regular Americans, dissenting scientists, newspaper competitors, and even the president of the United States.”.....so true!
It really is much the same thing as happened with 9/11 (CCP COVID). After 9/11, America went on an orgy of promoting Islam, worrying more about discrimination than about the lethal threat of Islam. The attack worked in that traditional, robust Americanism was decried and denounced - by America - in the search for “root causes.”
The exact same thing is happening with the CCP attack using COVID - in America, it is seen as criminal to blame China - Trump and conservative American are the ones that are blamed. Again the attack worked. And it worked because the dominant power in America is the totalitarian government class, which is strongly allied with traditional America’s enemies.
And I’m still wondering if ChiCom virus release was done as part of a deal with the Demonicrats, including ChiComjoe. The Demonicrats could have been that desparate, since everything else they tried had failed against Trump.
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