Bloomberg News Stealth Edits Story: Trump Threatening to Exit WHO Leaves ‘Xi to Lead Virus Fight’

May 19th, 2020 1:58 PM

You’d think that Bloomberg News would want to lay low after a recent report showing it censored a story about Chinese elites and fired the reporter behind it.

The news outlet is still shilling for Beijing and its tyrant leader Xi Jinping. Bloomberg News plastered a Chinese propaganda, stealth-edited piece on the front page of its website headlined “Trump Threatens to Exit WHO, Leaving Xi to Lead Virus Fight.” The piece spewed how “Trump’s ‘America First’ policy has made Xi look more like a champion of the international order.”

The insane quote praising the communist dictator and denigrating Trump’s focus on “America First” has since been suspiciously deleted.

Bloomberg News also said in its original lede that this move “would leave Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the most prominent voice leading the global fight against the pandemic.”

That lede has also been changed to reflect a new headline.

The piece decried President Donald Trump’s written letter to World Health Organization Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, which panned the organization’s “alarming lack of independence from The People’s Republic of China.” Trump had threatened to cut off funding permanently and “reconsider [U.S.] membership” if the organization didn’t “demonstrate independence from China.”

The piece proceeded to praise how “Xi promised to devote $2 billion toward fighting the pandemic over the next two years while urging greater international cooperation to defeat the virus.”
 

It then even had the audacity to include propaganda from the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian:

'Arbitrarily cutting funding to an international organization is unilateralist behavior,’ Zhao said. ‘We urge the U.S. to stop passing the buck and deepen international cooperation.’

Bloomberg News didn’t mention that it was Zhao who “”tweeted a piece headlined “COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US” at 9:02 p.m. on March 12. Later that day he speculated, “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.’”

The piece’s only mention of China lying about the virus was actually phrased as a dig at the president and buried in the 28th paragraph. Bloomberg News stated: “[Trump] consistently praised China’s handling of the virus in January and February, even after he was told by the intelligence community on Jan. 28 Beijing was withholding key data about the virus.”

The piece did not use the same phrasing as The New York Post and The Guardian in its minor critique of China. The New York Post editorial board released an editorial April 26 headlined “China is still blatantly lying about its coronavirus deaths.” The Guardian published a piece April 23 headlined “China coronavirus cases may have been four times official figure, says study.”

Bloomberg News also shielded W.H.O. from criticism, portraying Trump’s criticisms of the organization as purely his own: “[The letter] listed several examples of what he said were the WHO’s inaccurate statements about the virus and its praise of the Chinese government’s response.”

The New York Times, which also recently tried to shield W.H.O. from Trump’s criticisms, couldn’t avoid that others were also concerned about the organization:

[G]lobal health officials and political leaders — not just Mr. Trump — have said the organization was too willing to accept information supplied by China, which still has not provided accurate numbers on how many people were infected and died during the initial outbreak in the country.