Former CNN President Jeff Zucker reportedly told staffers to ignore the lab leak theory of COVID-19’s origins because it was a “Trump talking point.”
Zucker gave the order in the early months of 2020 as the pandemic first kicked off, a “well-placed CNN insider” allegedly told Fox Digital. The network’s coverage of the origins of the virus during the following months took a dismissive tone toward the lab leak theory, with personalities calling it “misinformation” and a “conspiracy theory.”
CNN ex-boss Jeff Zucker told staff not to probe ‘lab leak’ theory because it was ‘Trump talking point’ https://t.co/QNX2Vep7HF pic.twitter.com/t77AtZczmd
— New York Post (@nypost) March 6, 2023
On March 28, 2020, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy published a piece called “Here’s how to debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories from friends and family,” and an April 2020 headline called the lab leak theory “almost certainly not true.”
“Its origin is up for debate, but it wasn’t made in a lab,” the outlet reported at the time, according to Fox Digital.
In May of 2020, then-CNN journalist Chris Cillizza wrote that “outside of Trump and his immediate inner circle, most people in a position to know are very, very skeptical of the Trump narrative that the virus came out of a lab.” Cillizza also lauded then-presidential medical adviser Anthony Fauci for arguing that the virus most likely originated naturally.
Fauci, along with a host of others who initially dismissed it, now acknowledges that the lab leak is at least plausible. Others experts, including many who are far from “Trump and his inner circle,” go further, claiming the lab leak is the most likely explanation for the origin of the pandemic. (RELATED: ‘New Evidence Suggests’ Dr. Fauci Was Primary Source Of Covid Disinformation Campaign, House Subcommittee Says)
That group includes President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy, along with several intelligence agencies and a host of virologists and biologists.