This is Why It’s Almost Impossible to Trust the Mainstream Media Now

Journalists are giving us news and “facts” based on self-interest and groupthink

Monica Harris
Thoughts And Ideas
Published in
8 min readApr 28, 2021

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Photo/Shutterstock

Not long after the world locked down last year, a story surfaced on The Epoch Times and other “fake news” sites claiming that COVID-19 had originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, and not at a grungy wet market as widely believed. Even more shocking, the story alleged that the U.S. government had funded research at the lab.

When Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist-turned-whistleblower, confirmed the claims, the story went viral — and it’s not hard to see why. Imagine if the virus that had killed hundreds of thousands of people and brought civilization to a grinding halt had been created not by some fluke of nature, but intentionally with the assistance of the two most powerful governments in the world? It sounded crazy and disturbing on so many levels, but could it possibly be true…?

It didn’t take long for fact checkers to give us an answer. The claim was vigorously debunked, the Chinese virologist/whistleblower discredited, and for the past year — even as recently as February 2021 — it’s been written off as the scientific equivalent of urban legend.

Then a funny thing happened.

The debunked story re-surfaced two weeks ago, but this time it wasn’t on a “fake news” site. It appeared on “Rising,” a digital news program produced by The Hill, the largest independent political news source in the U.S. (ranking second in online readership behind CNN). In a fascinating expose, The Hill’s reporters found compelling evidence that the Chinese government had, in fact, collaborated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci) to experiment with SARS-type viruses at — surprise! — a lab in Wuhan.

And why did The Hill decide to tackle this story? Because a week earlier Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, caused a firestorm on 60 Minutes when he opined that COVID-19 may have escaped from — yep, you guessed it — a lab in Wuhan. (Predictably, Redfield was rebuked for “counterproductive” comments that fuel discrimination against Asian-Americans, and he’s currently in the

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Monica Harris
Thoughts And Ideas

Unplugged from our distorted reality. Check out my book: “The Illusion of Division" https://tinyurl.com/2p9c56cz