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It has long been forgotten by many, but it was completely prohibited during the first year of the COVID pandemic, even to question the virus's origins. That's because Anthony Fauci had his various minions issue a decree in The Lancet in a now notorious proclamation at the very start of the pandemic, announcing – falsely – that it was already scientifically proven that COVID began with an organic, natural zoonotic leap, from animal species to humans. As a result, they proclaimed, any discussion of the possibility that the virus leaked from the coronavirus lab in Wuhan, China, was deceitful disinformation, racism and an attack on science.
Since then, the FBI and the elite scientific unit of the Department of Energy under Joe Biden rejected that certainty and concluded that it is more likely than not that the virus came from a lab leak, not from a zoonotic animal-to-human leap. The CIA this week announced findings of an investigation conducted under the Biden administration that concluded the same thing: it is the agency's official position now that COVID came from a leak in the Wuhan lab.
It goes without saying that the mere fact that these agencies believe this to be true does not prove that it is in fact true: they often lie. But the issue here is not that they made mistakes, but that they prevented those mistakes from being examined by asserting a certainty as a basis for censoring discussion of what they were claiming.
CNN’s Jim Acosta was told that he could stay at the network only if he agreed to host a show in the middle of the night. Nobody watches CNN in prime time - imagine how lonely it would be to host a show at 1 a.m. As a result, he announced on the network that he was leaving CNN, making clear he was doing so because he did not want to be relegated to the bewitching hours. He took the opportunity – needless to say – to once again depict himself as a singularly and shockingly brave reporter who has become the Conscience of the Nation through his relentless and noble bravery in standing up to power whatever the cost.
Liberals and other assorted democratic partizans are – for totally understandable reasons – lamenting Acosta's departure. In fact, they're indignant about it. If you were them, wouldn't you be? He was a 24-hour-a-day propaganda machine for the Democratic Party masquerading as a journalist. But given that he has in fact been held up by some, including his own colleagues, as some sort of model of American journalism, it is well worth using his portrayal and now his forced resignation to examine the vital questions of what has been meant by the words “journalist” and “journalism” inside these corporate news outlets, and to see how they are possibly changing.
