This morning I went to CNN and read, maybe, the best article of 2021 thus far.
The piece was exhaustively researched and the presentation was sleek and easily digestible. It spelled out what the Chinese Government was telling the public about Covid and what citizen-journalists were attempting to expose. Yong Xiong is a producer for CNN's Beijing Bureau and Julia Hollingsworth is a digital producer. Their research was impeccable and confirmed fears that independent journalists had already been leaking out.
Then what am I bitching about? The story of the Covid-19 happened in real time. CNN could have done this article 14 months ago. Why didn't they? Ahhhh.......
I cannot stress this enough. No journalists went to jail in America because they reported on Covid. NONE. Yong Xiong's participation in The Truthtellers could still result in his loss of freedom. Many citizen-journalists in China have already lost their freedom, but I wrote about this in February of 2020, from my living room in Cleveland, Ohio.
"CNN's headlines should scream "Where's Chen Qiushi?" The Chinese government responds "there's nothing to see here." - Beacon of Speech's CNN vs. The Flu
I don't have special intelligence on the ground in China. I simply used news sources that weren't CNN. I went to Drudge Report, BBC, and Reuters. News of the coming plague weren't non-existent, they were buried.
The above screen grab is from January 25, 2020. The liberal media that sets the agenda in this country were all in on impeachment. And, don't get me wrong, most of the right wing media were all in impeachment too, but on the side of Donald Trump. But the CNN example shows the problem of everything being permeated by politics.
By Mid-February of 2020, The Truthtellers Story COULD have been written, there's very few anecdotes past March 2020 contained within. Very little of the information I had read in the Truthtellers was "new." So here's our questions:
Was CNN so consumed with hatred for Trump, that they sat on the story for a year? It was Donald Trump who kept playing the Covid was China's fault card.
Was CNN afraid for the safety of Yong Xiong? Were they so concerned that the Trump administration wouldn't support a CNN reporter, that they weren't comfortable publishing the story? Did CNN have to make arrangements to protect their reporter?
If the story is "new," what took CNN so long to figure out what outlets in Great Britain and American bloggers were writing about over a year ago?
For a year, CNN used the Chinese Government as their Covid sourcing. Please tell me that CNN didn't just figure out that the Chinese Government was lying. All of China's neighbors, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, were all able to get initial victories over Covid because they all ASSUMED China was lying.
The timing of the article is very suspicious. It almost appears that the story was greenlit at Biden's inauguration. Why would it matter who was President when the article was published?
Again, I don't blame Xiong or Hollingsworth, they did an excellent job of reporting. I blame the corporate lackeys at CNN for either sitting on a story for a year, or for not figuring out that citizen-journalists were missing for a year. Neither option is a good look for a billion dollar media conglomerate.
How is the Truthtellers revisionist history if I can't stop complimenting the writers? For a year I begged CNN to do a deep dive on citizen-journalists in China.
Here &
Here &
Here.
But at the end of the day, I am nobody. I'm not being self-deprecating, I'm saying no one cares what me or my blog think. It is CNN's job as highly paid journalistic professionals to be Truthtellers when the Truth happens, not when it is politically favorable to tell the truth.