Twitter CEO Elon Musk suggested on Monday that he could slap CNN with a warning label after a new report this week alleged that the company stopped reporters from looking into whether the pandemic originated in a Chinese lab in Wuhan.
The news comes after Wall Street Journal report from last week said that the Department of Energy now assesses that the pandemic originated from a lab leak, an assessment that FBI Director Christopher Wray said that bureau agrees with.
Musk responded to Twitter user who asked Musk, “When are you going to label CNN as State Affiliated Media?”
“Good point,” Musk responded. “If an organization portrays itself as balanced, but is not, it should be labeled to inform the public.”
Fox News reported this week that an insider at CNN revealed that the network’s former president Jeff Zucker ordered staffers to forego investigating claims that the pandemic originated in a Chinese lab, arguing the discussion would only serve as a “Trump talking point.”
“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider told Fox News Digital. “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”
Zucker’s disdain for anything related to former President Donald Trump drove the network into an anti-Trump operation from the moment he descended an escalator at Trump Tower and announced his bid for the White House nearly eight years ago. From that day forward, the network pushed countless false accusations, misapplied or misrepresented facts, and omitted pertinent information surrounding Trump’s only term in office.
When COVID began spreading across the globe three years ago, a concerted effort formed almost instantly from legacy media, public health officials, and Democrat Party politicians to suppress or dismiss the idea the virus possibly leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the central Chinese city.
Zucker and other CNN officials played a role in attempting to debunk such narratives about the pandemic.
Under Zucker’s watch, CNN’s Oliver Darcy published a story headlined, “Here’s how to debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories from friends and family,” on March 28, 2020, which attempted to give the network’s sinking viewership advice on how to converse with family and friends who refused to believe the mainstream media’s take on COVID.
“While the coronavirus pandemic has isolated family and friends inside their homes, it has in many cases increased online or over-the-phone communication with loved ones,” Darcy wrote. “But, in some cases, relatives and friends share poor information – whether it is bad science related to how to prevent the virus, debunked rumors about cities being put on lockdown, or conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19.”
Darcy added the so-called misinformation related to a public health crisis poses a risk to those who fall victim to it — one of the many reports to come out of the network dismissing anything that goes against the mainstream narrative.
CNN host Fareed Zakaria said during a broadcast that “the far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory” when discussing the lab leak.
Zucker resigned from his post last year after an internal investigation into disgraced former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo revealed that the former network president had an ongoing consensual relationship — with top marketing officer Allison Gollust — at the media network that he had failed to disclose to the company.
Brandon Drey contributed to this report.