Topic: CNSNews.com
As a loyal pro-Trump stenographer, CNSNews.com loves to repeat falsehoods from President Trump without bothering to fact-check or correct them. He's been talking a lot during the coronavirus pandemic, and CNS remains happy to just scribble down whetever he says without telling readers it's false.
Susan Jones transcribed in a March 18 article:
"I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning, including my very early decision to close the 'borders' from China - against the wishes of almost all. Many lives were saved. The Fake News new narrative is disgraceful & false!"
President Trump issued that tweet shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday, after listening to negative coverage from the morning news shows.
But as an actual news outlet pointed out, Trump has a history of comments showing he did not, in fact, take it verious seriously:
In late January, when a CNBC reporter asked if there were “worries about a pandemic” spreading from China, where it was first reported in December, he replied, “No, not at all. We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
While speaking about the first cases of COVID-19 reported in the U.S. at a White House news conference on Feb. 26, he claimed that "pretty soon" there could only be one or two people affected.
“We’re going to be pretty soon at only five people,” Trump said. “And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.”
The next day, at a White House meeting, he said, "It's going to disappear. One day -- it's like a miracle - it will disappear." He has suggested, without firm scientific evidence, that warmer weather would stop the spread.
In a March 19 article, Melanie Arter uncritically repeated:
President Donald Trump said Thursday that his administration was prepared to deal with the pandemic of the coronavirus, but he wasn’t prepared to deal with the media.
The president complained that the press, and specifically NBC News, called him “racist” for banning foreign nationals traveling from China from entering the United States.
But Trump did not offer a specific example of anyone at NBC calling him "racist" over that decision -- and, thus, neither did Arter. YOu'd think an example could be easily found if that actually happened.
The same day, Arter served up more stenography:
President Donald Trump announced “exciting progress” Thursday in finding therapy drugs to fight the coronavirus.
Not only has a drug that’s used to fight malaria and treat arthritis shown promise in fighting COVID-19, but the administration is looking at drugs used overseas to treat the virus.[...]
The president pointed to chloriquine, a drug that has been shown to be effective in treating arthritis and malaria, as a potential treatment for COVID-19.
[...]
["]They've been trying for many decades to get this approved. It sounds simple, but it's not, because there is liability involved in lots of other things. I was able to get it approved, working with Congress. Right to try. This is beyond right to try. What we are talking about today is beyond right to try.["]
Arter didn't tell her readers that chloroquine has, in fact, not been approved to treat coronavirus.
Arter returned on March 24 for another false claim from Trump:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had a chance to order 16,000 ventilators five years ago for a discount, but he opted for death panels and lotteries instead, President Donald Trump said Tuesday.
During his press conference on Tuesday, Cuomo complained that the federal government only sent 400 ventilators, when they needed 30,000.
[...]
Trump was referring to an op-edby former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey published March 19, 2020 by the New York Post:
In fact, McCaughey -- a longtime misinformer on the subject of health care -- appears to have misread a state report on pandemic preparedness, falsely interpreting a worst-case scenario that might require thousands of ventilators as a "chance" to buy them; the report does not even make a ruling on the optimal number of ventilators the state should have stockpiled. The "death panels" reference is to recommended procedures in the report regarding triage.
If CNS is going to be nothing more than a Trump stenography website, it should stop calling itself "news."
