Coronavirus is real. COVID-19 is a particularly dangerous coronavirus pandemic. Donald Trump denied the significance of the pandemic for months and took little action to alleviate it. Republican governors like Gregory Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida joined in denials, discouraging safety and reopening activities while New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shut things down and provided facts to people to encourage social distancing, mask, and other mitigation strategies.
UPDATE: After all the bad publicity, Sinclair cancelled the broadcast just hours after this article was published.
In the past few months, the worst hit state, New York, got its curve under control while the rest of the nation, and particularly states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, and even California had things go out of control.
To cover up the obvious political failure of Republicans to take the pandemic seriously, a documentaryish video was uploaded to YouTube called “Plandemic.” The video claimed that coronavirus was made in lab, that vaccines do not work, that Bill Gates is a mastermind behind the scheme, and other things.
These claims — even if they were true — could not explain or excuse the failure of Donald Trump and Republicans generally to take the pandemic seriously and save lives, so such claims cannot protect the dismal failure of the Donald Trump administration. Seriously, how would coronavirus being made in lab absolve Donald Trump of his duty to protect America from a deadly pandemic?
The video Plandemic was removed from YouTube and banned by Facebook, but now Sinclair Broadcasting is promoting it on the partisan Republican propaganda show “America This Week” broadcast on its stations. Wikipedia describes Sinclair:
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (SBG) is a publicly traded American telecommunications conglomerate which is controlled by the family of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in the Baltimore suburb of Hunt Valley, Maryland, the company is the second-largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations (after Nexstar Media Group),…
So this Republican partisan outfit has huge power to influence people in America. But Sinclair does not exist in a vacuum — it rides on top of the status and reputation of the old “big three” networks and other broadcast corporations using them to popularize and credit its own offerings, as described in Sourcewatch:
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (SBG) is a media company that owns and operates the largest number of TV stations — 483 local television channels — in the United States, as of its 2016 annual report. Those channels include 36 ABC, 30 CBS, 22 NBC, and 54 FOX affiliates, reaching approximately 38 percent of all U.S. television households (the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) national ownership cap restricts television broadcasters from reaching more than 39 percent of the country’s population)…
Sinclair runs 88 affiliates of the big three. By providing Sinclair with these popular schedules. and by leaving Sinclair to fill the rest of its schedule with blatant partisan propaganda — in this case deadly propaganda — the networks condone the propaganda.
