In one of its saddest reactions to Trump Derangement Syndrome, CNN ran from the so-called “lab leak theory” over COVID-19 because reporting on it would benefit President Trump.
According to a Fox News story, a “well-placed insider” at CNN described how then-CNN president Jeff Zucker called the Wuhan theory a “Trump talking point” and ordered the newsroom to ignore it.
“There was no sort of evaluation,” Curtis Houck, of the Media Research Center, says, “because you just started the position of Trump can't be trusted.”
At the same time CNN reporters and anchors were ignoring the Wuhan lab leak, a CNN.com article urged readers to “debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories,” and it offered advice on how to correct friends and family members, according to an MRC analysis.
A second CNN story complained too many Americans believed the lab leak theory, citing a Pew Research poll, and another CNN story celebrated that Anthony Fauci “crushed” Donald Trump and his theory the virus escaped from a Chinese lab.
Houck points out mainstream media outlets, Democrat politicians, political analysts, and even Trump-hating Republicans reflexively claimed the opposite of whatever President Trump was saying or suggesting at the time.
“Anything that Donald Trump proposes is crock,” Houck says of that reasoning. “It is junk science, isn't healthy, isn't safe.”
There is another word for that reasoning: Trump Derangement Syndrome.
