Analysis

3 Stories The Media Ignored Last Week

DailyWire.com

Once again this week, the legacy media have exerted their bias over America’s news diet, selectively featuring stories that favor their agenda and eliding stories that paint a more realistic and less optimistic picture of life under the Biden administration.

Here are three of the most significant stories the media failed to cover in proportion to their importance:

1.  The NIH seemingly admits funding gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Last Wednesday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) raised questions about whether it had funded gain of function research regarding increasing the transmissibility of “bat coronavirus” to humans at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“‘I told you so’ doesn’t even begin to cover it here,” wrote Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on Wednesday as he tweeted a copy of the NIH letter.

As The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti reported, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request uncovered “evidence that the NIH issued a ‘bat coronavirus grant’ to a group called the EcoHealth Alliance for ‘$3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans.’”

The NIH wrote in a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-TN) on Wednesday that it had indeed awarded a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn funded research on the issue at the infamous Chinese research lab.

The letter says that mice who carried human receptors were infected with the “SHC014 WIV 1 bat coronavirus” and “became sicker than those infected with the W1V1 bat coronavirus,” although it claims “[t]his was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”

The NIH asserts “the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) are not and could not have become SARS-CoV-2.”

Under questioning from Senator Paul, Dr. Anthony Fauci insisted in May that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” One expert defined the term: “Gain-of-function (GOF) research involves experimentation that aims or is expected to (and/or, perhaps, actually does) increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens.” This grant certainly seems to fit that category. Yet Brianna Keilar of CNN’s “New Day” said in May, “Nothing brings out Senator Paul’s propensity to act like an ass like a congressional appearance by Fauci.”

“Knowing it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement?” Senator Paul asked Fauci in July.

“Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about,” Fauci replied. “This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.”

“If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you,” Fauci insisted.

Much of the legacy media played the clip as an example of Fauci triumphantly vanquishing Paul. In July, CNN’s Jake Tapper called Senator Paul’s statement “another kind of misinformation.” And Don Lemon accused Senator Paul of “suggesting without evidence that the NIH, the National Institute of Health, funded so-called gain of function research.” Lemon has yet to cover the latest NIH admission — or apologize to Senator Rand Paul.

2. Biden breaks historic record — for the most illegal immigrants in U.S. history

President Joe Biden continues to make history for all the wrong reasons.

The Biden administration officially announced its newest historic first on Friday: More illegal immigrants have entered the United States during his first year in office than any time in U.S. history.

Border Patrol agents encountered a total of 1,734,686 illegal immigrants at the southern border during Fiscal Year 2021, which began last September. The monthly level of illegal entries “skyrocketed in the months after President Biden took office,” according to The Washington Post.

If the number of illegal immigrants who crossed the southern border in the last year were settled in a barren spot on the desert, they would constitute the fifth largest city in the United States — with a greater population than Phoenix or Philadelphia. “The vast majority of those apprehended at the southern border are being released into our communities, as CBP’s own publicly available numbers show,” said former DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, who is now with the Heritage Foundation.

This year’s record breaks the previous all-time high set in 1986 (1,692,544) and its close rival in 2001 (1,676,438).

All three surges coincided with the apparent belief that the U.S. government was about to grant amnesty to its illegal immigrant population. The rumor proved true in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Simpson–Mazzoli Act (formally the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986) supposed to exchange legalization of amnesty for illegal immigrants in exchange for permanently securing the southern border. President Bill Clinton advocated a policy described as a “mini-amnesty” in 2000, and the 2000 Democratic Party platform called for “adjusting the status of immigrants with deep roots in the country.” And in 2019, candidate Joe Biden said that U.S. taxpayers have an “obligation” to provide health care to illegal aliens. Todd Bensman, who interviewed Haitians camped illegally on the Texas border, said, “They say they heard Joe Biden was opening the border up, so they came.”

Conversely, illegal entries fell to a 46-year low in 2017 (310,531), when President Donald Trump’s election brought news that the U.S. government would adequately enforce U.S. immigration law for the first time in decades.

The legacy media have downplayed the story. Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo did not mention it. The entire MSNBC prime time lineup ignored the story (although Joy Reid lamented the number of Haitians being returned to Haiti). CNN’s analysis of its own town hall with President Biden made one muffled reference to “the administration’s blind spot over record arrivals of undocumented migrants at the southern border,” but apparently it did not occur to Anderson Cooper to raise the issue when he had more than an hour of the president’s time and (relatively) undivided attention.

The New York Times obscured the scale of the illegal immigration surge, reporting, “Migrants were encountered 1.7 million times in the last 12 months, the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960” (emphasis added) — as though 1.7 million illegal aliens may have crossed the Rio Grande before 1960. Had the Times bothered to check, it would have found the number of illegal immigrant encounters is available back to 1925. The Times is either showing its inability to access facts, or its refusal to present them accurately if they harm a Democratic president.

Instead, the legacy media seem to have linked illegal immigration to the alleged effects of global climate change. The New York Times “reported” that “The pandemic paired with natural disasters, drives a record number of illegal U.S. border crossings.” The Washington Post also ran a story on Thursday titled “US: More threats, more desperate refugees as climate warms.” Their coverage falls in line with the talking points of the Biden administration, which released a new report on Thursday attempting to link the explosive growth in illegal immigration on its watch to greenhouse gas emissions. “This assessment marks the first time the U.S. [g]overnment is officially recognizing and reporting on this linkage,” a linkage so obscure it hadn’t occurred to the migrants themselves. (The White House begrudgingly “acknowledges that in almost all cases climate change is not the sole driver of migration.”)

Somehow, the media have regarded the enormity of America’s broken border as a story unworthy of American citizens’ attention.

3.  President Biden promise to open the nation’s ports 24/7 has flopped

When President Joe Biden announced last Wednesday that he would solve the supply chain crisis by keeping the ports at Los Angeles and Long Beach operating 24/7, a total of 138 ships were docked in those two harbors. By last Friday, the Biden administration managed to work that down to 163. The number of container ships increased from 86 (56 at anchor) to 106 (with 77 at anchor) over the same period, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.

 

Those figures illustrate the failure of President Biden’s attempts to open up America’s blocked ports and snarled supply chain to American consumers in time for Christmas.

The issue of opening ports has challenges of its own. Thanks to outsourcing the job to foreign competitors, “most shipping companies are foreign and did not attend Biden’s briefing and don’t care about what he” thinks, waterfront labor negotiator Jim Tessier told the Washington Examiner.

The ports must also pay longshoremen time-and-a-half to work on weekends, a fact that President Biden — who has made increased unionization a hallmark of his presidency — should note.

But it does no good to have the ports work round-the-clock unless the rest of the supply chain follows suit. Truckers are already stretched to capacity, and warehouses are frequently closed overnight.

That has resulted in stacking containers in parking lots or outside locked warehouses, triggering safety concerns. This week, a container slid into a parking lot, flattening a parked car. (No one was injured.)

Those in the industry have spent the entire week telling a handful of business and industry media outlets that the Biden administration has failed — cries which have fallen on deaf ears in the legacy media. Here are a few examples of the industry’s poor assessment of the Biden administration’s port strategy:

  • “That’s not going to solve the issue,” said Brian Bourke, chief growth officer at the logistics firm Seko;
  • “We’re talking about a less than 1% to 2% change here,” Brian Whitlock, a supply chain analyst at Gartner, told Business Insider;
  • “Extending the hours alone will not alleviate the problem,” said Leonard Arriola of Dependable, which provides logistics to California’s ports; and
  • “Nothing will change if ports operate 24 hours,” said Siegfried Adam Jr. of the customs house broker Peter Wittwer North America. “It’s a dumb idea. It solves nothing.”

But perhaps the most damning statement came from the executive director who oversees the Port of Long Beach, who essentially gave the Biden plan a vote of no confidence.

“Shop early, because these delays and bottlenecks are going to continue to the end of the year,” Mario Cordero told Bloomberg Television on Thursday.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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