It is sad to start off this blog with reviewing the fake news media, but this is where it has come to. According to several news media, such as NU.nl, DeMorgen, NOS, HLN, Metro News, Trouw and many more: ‘Trump suggested to inject disinfectant’. It is clear to me now they’re not even trying to be honest anymore. The most honest thing they could do is to provide their audience with a link to the entire press briefing. Understandingly not everyone has the time to watch it in its entirety, so let’s brake it down to what this briefing was about, what has been said and how the media chose to cover this.
The goal of this press briefing was to inform the people of recent findings in the research on the Covid-19 virus. William Bryan, who leads the Science and Technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, presented the findings which state that temperature, humidity and sunlight drastically impact the virus’ half life. He went on to say that research is still to be done yet on the effect of disinfectants: “We’re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the Covid-19 virus in saliva. This is not the end of our work as we continue to characterise this virus and integrate our findings into practical applications to mitigate exposure and transmission.” From here on is the part where Trump got attacked over.
Trump starts off with questions directed at Bryan about the research of solar light on the virus. He then continues to ask about the research on disinfectants: “Right and then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way where we can do something like that? By injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Cause you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number so it’d be interesting to check that. So that you’d gonna have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds, it sounds interesting to me.” This is the quote where the media are losing their minds over.
Trump clearly has no knowledge on the subject, but neither does he suggest that people should inject disinfectant into their bodies. He is merely asking the question whether research on that would be useful. If you really interpreted the other way, then you are probably one of the reasons why there’s a peanut allergy label on peanuts. This was just a handful of ‘news’ media from the Netherlands and none of them did their job properly. Instead of reporting on what has been said, they chose to take one piece, took it out of context and ran a negative headline to smear Trump. And people still wonder why Trump calls the media fake news. I wonder if these people will ever wake up.
Ruben on Right 