It’s a side of the story the national media will be studiously ignoring.
When an Arizona man died after ingesting fish tank cleaner as part of a twisted effort to avoid infection from the coronavirus shortly after President Donald Trump discussed potentially lifesaving drugs at a March 29 White House news conference, it didn’t take long for the media to start pinning the blame for the death on the president’s words.
It didn’t matter, obviously, that anyone who self-medicates with fish tank cleaner might not be making the best decisions in life.
It didn’t matter that Trump had discussed a different substance entirely from what the man and his wife ingested — the anti-malarial drug chloroquine, versus a fish tank cleaner containing chloroquine phosphate.
NBC News and CNN, your coverage is misleading and false! An Arizona man tragically died because he swallowed Fish Tank Cleaner and not these prescribed human medications. It doesn't matter if you like @realDonaldTrump or not. You have a responsibility to report the facts!
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What mattered was bashing Trump, and if that meant cynically using a 68-year-old man’s death to do it, the mainstream media has already proven its animosity to the president knows no bounds.
And the willingness of the man’s wife to hold Trump responsible for her husband’s utterly avoidable death had to be irresistible.
“Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure,” the unidentified woman told NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard in a March 23 interview from her intensive care unit. “Oh, my God. Don’t take anything. Don’t believe anything. Don’t believe anything that the president says and his people.”
For the rest of the media, the narrative was set.
An older couple, self-isolating to save themselves from the coronavirus, had foolishly listened to the president of the United States and innocently poisoned themselves on his misguided advice.
But as Alana Goodman wrote at the Washington Free Beacon on Monday, that wasn’t quite the whole story.
The woman, now identified only by the first name of Wanda, aged 61, has been a reliable financial supporter of liberal causes during the Trump presidency, Goodman reported.
“Federal Election Commission records show that Wanda has donated thousands of dollars to Democratic electoral groups and candidates over the past two years, including Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and EMILY’s List, a group that aims to elect pro-choice female candidates,” Goodman wrote.
Tellingly, her interest in supporting Democrats seems to have coincided with the emergence of Trump.
Her first recorded donation was in 2016 — $150 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Goodman reported.
After Trump’s upset victory in November 2016, she gave $550 to the Democratic National Committee in 2017, Goodman wrote.
Her financial commitment to the anti-Trump cause apparently kept rising. Since 2018, according to Goodman, Wanda has donated $6,000 to “Democratic electoral groups.”
Obviously, this isn’t the story the media presented to the American people.
But is it reasonable to think that someone who apparently loathes the president is going to take his off-the-cuff medical advice to heart enough to put fish tank cleaner in a soda and drink it to ward off the possibility of contagion?
A large number of commenters on social media didn’t think so.
If this woman trusted Trump, it would be the first time - sorry, not buying it.freebeacon.com/latest-news/wo…
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WELL, THAT EXPLAINS A LOT --- Wuhan Virus Watch: Woman Who Self-Medicated with Fish Tank Cleaner and Blamed Trump, Donated Big to Democrats legalinsurrection.com/2020/03/wuhan-…
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Trump is hopeful about a drug, a Trump-hating woman “spontaneously” decides that Trump explicitly recommended eating fish tank cleaner, her husband dies, and the media has a ready-made headline. No matter how you spin it, it’s a fishy story, at best. americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/w…
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Of course, it’s a free country.
And if a woman who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and has donated more than $6,000 to Democratic causes during the Trump presidency suddenly decides to ingest poison because Trump said a similar-sounding drug just might have the potential to be effective against coronavirus infection, that’s her right.
But plenty of Americans are going to have trouble believing that — like the Twitter user Techno Fog, whose Monday evening Twitter thread was showcased Tuesday on the conservative Twitter aggregating site Twitchy.com.
“A curious media would get the 911 call and see if there was an autopsy,” the Techno Fog thread concludes.
But that would require an American media that’s “curious” about anything that doesn’t involve damaging Donald Trump — and the American public should know all too well how that works.
While the mainstream media engaged in savage attacks on then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, it had no interest in reporting on the many obvious holes in his main accuser’s story, or what might have been her motivation.
When former Vice President Joe Biden was accused only last week of a graphic sexual assault allegedly involving a young woman on his office staff in the early 1990s, the national media turned a blind eye — and has kept it turned.
As Fox News noted on Sunday, NBC’s Chuck Todd interviewed Biden on Sunday, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper hosted a virtual town hall with the former vice president on Friday, and the new allegations never came up.
With a modern American media marked more by its political agenda and intellectual dishonesty, voters know there’s going to be a side of the story that will be ignored – even if it’s crucial to understanding the whole.
In the fishy fish tank story, thanks to the Free Beacon, ignoring that side just got a lot harder.
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