NY Times glosses over China’s role in pandemic to paint a rosy picture
January 7, 2021
The New York Times glossed over the role that China played in the coronavirus pandemic — and its cover-up attempts — to paint a very positive picture of life in the communist nation under Covid-19.
Times reporter Li Yuan, whose beat is China and Asia, wrote an article headlined, “In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom.”
“While many countries are still reeling from Covid-19, China — where the pandemic originated — has become one of the safest places in the world, ” she wrote. “The country reported fewer than 100,000 infections for all of 2020.” giving the impression that the government was honestly reporting the numbers despite evidence that they went to great lengths to cover-up virus reports.
Yuan wrote that while the Chinese citizenry “don’t have freedom of speech, freedom of worship or freedom from fear — three of the four freedoms articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” they do “have the freedom to move around and lead a normal day-to-day life.
“In a pandemic year, many of the world’s people would envy this most basic form of freedom.” The article also blamed President Donald Trump for ignoring the science and failing to take basic precautions to protect the country.
The bottom line for Yuan and the Times is that while China suppresses the most basic freedoms of its population and is a major human rights abuser — which Yuan conveniently never mentioned — and that it censored news about the virus, as reported in The New York Times. According to the times, nevertheless, the country is still a model for other countries on how to operate in a Covid-19 world.