ABC-TV 7pm news provides a nightly drip-drip of Democrat propaganda in its US coverage. The ABC’s US correspondents cut, clip and paste it from the liberal TV and print media. Thus all Trump items involve a sneer or smear – visually, verbally or in combination.

Will the taxpayer-funded ABC hacks give Trump derangement a rest during this Covid-19 crisis? Sorry, nope.

It cheered me up to catch Kathryn Diss telling a porky to the Australian public recently, on Saturday night, 14 March. I’ve sent in an official complaint. An Ita Buttrose apology to Trump would also be polite.

It was genre ABC that the un-fact went into an item of utmost importance – Trump’s announcement of a US National Emergency. Diss, from Washington DC, began with soft visuals about black Americans delivering food bank supplies to the vulnerable elderly. Then she reversed tone and began, ‘With the virus now reaching 47 states, President Donald Trump has made a delivery of his own’. This is standard TV news punning from the visuals but here with a facetious edge.

Trump: ‘Today I am officially declaring a National Emergency. Two very big words.’ That was all the ABC would permit unfiltered from the president as serious reporting, just 12 words.

Now for the big untruth.

Diss: ‘After initially calling it (Covid-19) a hoax and nothing more than the flu, the Commander-in-Chief now concedes it is time he too got tested.’

Trump has never called Covid-19 a hoax. This is just Democrat propaganda brought by ‘their’ ABC to our living rooms. Diss then inserts a whiney female US reporter to twist the knife on the ABC’s behalf.

Whiney female reporter: ‘Are you being selfish by not getting tested and potentially [inaudible but presumably, ‘infecting the innocent because you’re such a crap human being?’]…

Trump: ‘I didn’t say I was not going to be tested.’

Whiney female reporter: ‘Are you going to be?’

Trump: ‘Most likely, yes. (And he did get tested and he tested negative. So much for Diss’s narrative).

She then finds a new way to denigrate Trump. She cuts to Canada’s Trudeau, and says, ‘But his counterpart to the north has taken no chances after his wife tested positive.’

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau: ‘I will remain in self-isolation for 14 days.’

Diss (reinforcing her Trump/virus/hoax stuff): ‘The US media is reporting new modelling by the Centers For Disease Control which has put the potential impact of the outbreak into sharper focus. The CDC says infections could run into tens of millions with the death toll in the US ranging from 200,000 to 1.7m.’ Diss’s verballing of Trump originated from the Democrats’ flaks and the compliant media nearly three weeks ago and was scotched well before Diss’s pick-up. Even the liberal Washington Post on 13 March had awarded the ‘hoax’ story a damning ‘Four Pinocchios’.

Most lies have some germ of fact, and in this case Trump on 28 February during an 80-minute stump speech called the Democrats’ efforts to bag him over the Covid-19 outbreak “their new hoax”. The old ones were the Russia hoax and what he called the ‘impeachment hoax’. At no point did he suggest the virus itself was a hoax.

The media split on it. The deranged rushed to judgement, such as pundit Dana Milbank who tweeted, ‘Remember this moment. Trump, in South Carolina, just called the coronavirus a “hoax”’. The Politico blog took the same line. More responsible media got the story right, unlike the ABC. Trump in his speech went on to play down the lethality of the virus and at that point the US had seen no fatalities. Of the then 57 infections, 40 were from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Trump contrasted that with the flu’s normal annual toll in the US of about 35,000 and did say the US press was in ‘hysteria mode’. In fact, the US had its first death, of a chronically-ill woman, within a few hours of the speech. Given the speed the narrative is moving, his remarks were not a hanging offence.

On 29 February, he was affirming the virus’s seriousness and clarifying that ‘hoax’ referred ‘to the action that [Democrats] take to try and pin this on somebody, because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them, not – I’m not talking about what’s happening here [the virus]; I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the hoax. …But the way they refer to it – because these people have done such an incredible job, and I don’t like it when they are criticising these people. And that’s the hoax. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Trump being Trump, he added this beauty: “I like this [epidemic control] stuff, I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.’

The Democrat machine created a cynical campaign video cutting and combining Trump’s rally remarks to make him say, ‘Coronavirus…this is their new hoax.’ The Washington Post exposed the trick. ‘It just puts the words “coronavirus” and “hoax” close together, leaving the viewer to assume Trump meant that the novel coronavirus itself was a hoax,’ WaPo said. ‘Campaigns must be willing to make their case without resorting to video manipulation.’

The ABC’s Ms Diss has form. Here’s her panegyric the week before to candidate Joe Biden: ‘Unexcited, decent and experienced are three of the most commonly used words to describe Joe Biden… these appear to be the virtues voters are searching for.’ (Somehow she failed to mention that a month ago, Biden called a polite woman student who questioned him ‘a lying dog-faced pony soldier’. Or that when he was Vice President, his family cashed in remorselessly on his status.)

As for Ms Diss’s view of crazed pinko Bernie Sanders: ‘Perhaps his progressive, radical ideas are just too much for the electorate this time around.’ Bernie’s plans would cost $US97 trillion, by the way.

I try to be nice to my peers, short of a total free pass. Maybe Ms Diss will improve her transcript and fact-checking skills at journalism school, after which she could mentor the rest of the ABC about the  impartiality charter.

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