Ari Fleischer: The American Press Corps “Actually Suppressed Stories” Suggesting China Had A COVID Role
On Fox Across America with Jimmy Failla, Fox News Contributor and former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer discussed how the American press “rolled over” for China by not reporting on how the Wuhan lab and China had a role in the spread of COVID.
“Right from the beginning, when I realized that there was a viral laboratory in Wuhan, how could you not look at that? How could you not take it seriously? My gosh, if this had broken out in an American city that had a military lab that engaged in this type of research, do you not think the American press corps would have dug and dug deep to see could it have gotten out from that lab? They would have, of course, done it to America, but they didn’t do it to China. They actually suppressed stories that suggested China might have had a role in this. And the American press just rolls over. It’s one of the worst habits our press has, especially when dealing with dictatorial countries. They pound democracies and roll over for thugs.”
“They’re failing the truth. And we all depend on the media to tell us the truth. One of the biggest urges reporters have is to break stories that lead to more stories, because that’s the cycle. It’s the revelations, the excitement. You just wrote something that led to another discovery and then greater information came out and you build upon it. That’s what you can do in democracies. With dictatorships, you get nowhere. You write these stories and the dictatorship doesn’t listen. They don’t care. It doesn’t lead to something else. So there’s almost no upside when you write about the bad behavior of dictators. When you do it about people in our country, there’s no end in sight. And that’s one of the reasons the press holds us to this standard when they let China pretty much off. They gave them a pass.”
