The media’s generous treatment of Fauci allows them to avoid confronting what the diary reveals about the press itself.
Anthony Fauci’s newly released diaries include explosive revelations about how he lied publicly about the Covid fatality rate, the lab leak theory, school closures, and vaccines (among other things).Yet according to the propaganda press, the biggest takeaways are that Fauci disliked President Donald Trump, worried about threats, and really liked being famous. But perhaps that framing is no surprise: The diary entries don’t merely implicate Fauci for perpetrating the greatest coverup and attack on American freedoms through his “science.” They also expose that the same propagandists who pretended to be objective journalists while covering Fauci and the pandemic were the same people soliciting Fauci’s advice on how to interview Trump administration officials, managing Fauci’s public image, and trying to befriend him.
So naturally, the propaganda press has to cover the diaries in a way that minimizes the serious revelations and signals to readers that the story is nothing too concerning.
The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg headlined her piece: “Fauci, in Private Diary, Reflected on Covid’s Origins and His Own Fame.” Stolberg opened by recounting a January 2020 entry from Fauci in which he said the virus could have jumped from animals to humans and that the Wuhan wet market accelerated the spread of the virus. She then explained that Sen. Rand Paul released the diaries “as part of his investigation into whether the virus might have leaked from a laboratory and whether, as Mr. Paul claims, Dr. Fauci lied to Congress about it.” After acknowledging why Paul released the entries, though, she quickly told readers there was nothing important in those entries.
“The diary does not provide the smoking gun the senator is seeking,” Stolberg opined. “Rather, it echoes past disclosures showing Dr. Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientists’ views evolved.”
But the “smoking gun” evidence is there for anyone willing to open his eyes to see. Take, for example, Fauci’s testimony before Congress that “the seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent” and that “[t]he stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three.” He added the virus is “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.” Yet privately, Fauci said the “case fatality rate” was “more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%,” as reported in these pages by The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood.
Despite this, Stolberg instead ignores these damning revelations to focus on how Fauci was “obsessed with himself” (as if that’s the great offense) and that the entries show “the pressure he was under, as he became the public face of the government’s response while at the same time countering what he called ‘slanderous lies’ about him spread by ‘extreme right elements in society.’”
In other words, Fauci was actually the victim. Stolberg wrote that “critics spent much of the past several days digging through the records for tidbits in which he appeared to contradict himself.” One supposed “tidbit” is how Fauci publicly said he had “nothing to do” with school closures but that he wrote in his diary six years prior that he “convinced” Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut New York City schools down. Despite the diary entries proving the “critics” right, Stolberg nonetheless framed the story around Fauci’s victimhood, celebrity status, and the conduct of the “critics” who happened to notice the farce.
NBC News’ Monica Alba headlined her piece: “Anthony Fauci’s journal reveals how the Trump and Biden White Houses handled their Covid cases,” with a subhead arguing the release of the journal gives “behind-the-scenes insight into Covid with both presidents” as if that were the purpose or big takeaway from the diaries.
The Washington Post’s Sammy Westfall and Dan Diamond wrote, “Fauci’s diary reveals his thoughts on a ‘rambling’ Trump and his own fame.” The subhead read: “Released by GOP Sen. Rand Paul, diary entries from the federal scientist who helped lead the Covid response spotlight the internal battle over how to handle the outbreak.”
The article opened by stating Fauci “privately complained about President Donald Trump’s ‘rambling’ and reveled in media coverage of his role.” Its fifth paragraph characterized the entries as an “intimate look at how the prominent scientist at the center of the nation’s pandemic response navigated two presidential administrations during the spiraling health crisis.”
The Post then lists “key takeaways” of the entries such as Fauci’s “hot and cold relations with Trump” and how Fauci spent the first year of Covid “trying to counteract the president’s comments downplaying the outbreak,” followed by Fauci’s thoughts on the lab leak, his “moments of celebrity,” and threats made against him. (Notably, the lab leak section is rather favorable to Fauci).
Once again, the media present Fauci as battling Trump (the propaganda press’s favorite narrative) and having to navigate working with the Trump administration, confronting attacks, deliberating on scientific theories, and adjusting to fame. At least, that’s what they do when they aren’t ignoring the new revelations entirely, as is the case with multiple television news networks, such as CBS, ABC, and NBC. --->READ MORE HERE
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