Why do members of the free press keep parroting Chinese agitprop, including the preposterous and totally unverified claim that China has had not a single new coronavirus death since January?

“U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours,” NBC News recited this week. “Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported.”

Chinese officials concede they have new infection cases, but they also allege those cases were imported into China by dirty foreigners. This is the level on which the Chinese Communist Party has long operated — a sort of ultranationalism that seeks to blame outsiders for its nation's problems. Yet our media are accepting its dubious (even just from a math perspective) claims at face value.

Let me put this in terms that American journalists might understand, were they not so bound up in irrational hatred of the Trump administration: Is it possible, just maybe, that the timing of China's supposed good news is not coincidental to the fact that it recently expelled a bunch of U.S. reporters?

“Health officials reported 32 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus in mainland China on Monday, all of them imported, bringing the total to 81,740,” the NBC article continues. “The former epicenter of the epidemic, Wuhan, reported only two new confirmed cases in the past 14 days.”

Now seems like a good time to remind everyone that the regime that claims now to have had no new coronavirus deaths since January is the same regime that claims only 200 civilians and security personnel died in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. (The actual number may be as high as 10,000.)

Here comes the best part of the NBC report [emphasis added]:

The city has been showing signs of going back to normal since last week. With its subway and train service resuming last weekend, some businesses, supermarkets and shopping malls have also re-opened their doors.



Photos shared by state media in the past few days showed people venturing out into the streets, walking their dogs, buying food in the street markets and even relaxing on the banks of the Yangtze River — with many still wearing masks.

That latter part about state-provided photos should serve as a red flag. Has NBC spoken to anyone in Wuhan? Does anyone in the newsroom know anybody with a camera who may be able to verify that the state-provided photos are not from November? NBC's reporters seem incapable of considering that China’s data, and its potentially staged photographs, are unreliable and should not be passed along to viewers as fact.

But don't be too hard on NBC — a whole slew of Western news outlets, including Bloomberg News, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are doing the same thing.

To their credit, the New York Times and the Washington Post at least noted in their coverage that there are serious doubts about the accuracy of China’s official figures.

But NBC, CNN, and Bloomberg failed even to do this.

Speaking of Bloomberg, it reported on April 1 that the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report that China has “concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths.”

Do its reporters not talk to one another?

It is nothing short of amazing that as U.S. media continue to recite Chinese propaganda with all the eagerness of party functionaries, then wrestle with whether to censor or boycott President Trump’s coronavirus press briefings to protect the viewing public from false or misleading claims.

Good luck squaring that circle.