Last weekend, CNN began taking heat after it was discovered that former CEO Jeff Zucker told reporters to ignore the coronavirus lab leak theory because reporting on it could help Trump. Upon the revelations, Green Bay Packers offensive tackle David Bakhtiari blasted the news network for the partisan move.
The 31-year-old 2013 NFL Draft pick, jumped to his Twitter account on Monday to take aim at the biased reporting at CNN.
“Come on. I get people flat out don’t like Trump,” Bakhtiari wrote. “But what I hate more is withholding the truth from the people. YOU ARE THE NEWS! Be THE NEWS!!”
Come on. I get people flat out don’t like Trump. But what I hate more is withholding the truth from the people. YOU ARE THE NEWS! Be THE NEWS!! https://t.co/rNeVL0AIRM
— David Bakhtiari (@DavidBakhtiari) March 6, 2023
Bakhtiari was responding to a New York Post story in which the paper noted, “CNN’s then-president Jeff Zucker told his staffers not to investigate the ‘lab leak theory’ behind the origins of COVID-19 because he thought it was a ‘Trump talking point,’ according to a report.”
As Breitbart News reported on Monday, several other CNN insiders were also making claims that the lab leak theory is “fringe” and “almost certainly untrue.”
A “well-placed CNN Insider” told Fox News Digital that Zucker issued the directive in the early stages of the pandemic.
On March 13, 2020, Harmeet Kauer, a “culture writer” for CNN, called the notion that the virus may have started in a laboratory a “fringe theory.”
Her colleague, Scottie Andrew, on April 13, 2020, wrote an article entitled “Nearly 30% in the US believe a coronavirus theory that’s almost certainly not true” in regards to the lab leak theory. It included the subheading, “Its origin is up for debate, but it wasn’t made in a lab.”
“There’s still much we don’t know about the coronavirus pandemic, but virus experts agree on one piece of its origin story: The virus likely originated in a bat, not in a Chinese lab,” he wrote.
“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the source told Fox News. “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”
However, despite the near certainty and the lack of journalistic ethics exhibited by CNN, today authorities and reporters alike are suddenly lending credence to the theory, saying that it might be the correct assessment.
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