Murdoch's media fans China coronavirus conspiracy to get Trump re-elected: Former Australian PM

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has condemned fabricated news reports by American news mogul Rupert Murdoch's media outlets fanning the conspiracy theory that the novel coronavirus was made in a Wuhan-based lab, saying they have just one aim -- to get US President Donald Trump re-elected.

"Let's be clear: Murdoch is campaigning full-bore for Trump," Rudd wrote in an article that was published on The Guardian on Friday.

"Having delivered its political ordinance in support of Trump and (US Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo, the Murdoch story carefully and cleverly seeks to cover its traces by stating repeatedly that nothing is yet proven about the laboratory leak," he argued.

"The truth is, at this stage, none of us know definitively whether the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory," he added.

Rudd pointed out that some journalists who think they are working for an imminent security threat are actually harming their country's long-term interests.

"Lies were reported as facts. Credible skeptics were downplayed, ignored, or attacked as unpatriotic 'appeasers.' The thrill of landing a big 'story' overtook the media's fundamental duty to prevent the public from being deceived," he wrote.

Rudd stressed that the public has "every right" to know about how the COVID-19 pandemic came about, including information like whether the governments took all necessary actions to prepare for the virus reaching their own countries, or whether these warnings were effectively ignored, which, however, "appears to have been the case in the US"

Trump and Pompeo both claimed that they've got evidence that the novel coronavirus originated from a lab based in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

Yet, no proof of their assertion can be provided.

In an interview with ABC News' "This Week" on May 3, Pompeo contradicted himself by saying that he believes the best experts in the country who think the virus was man-made, and also believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that says the scientific consensus was not man-made or genetically modified.

Australia's Daily Telegraph said in a report on May 4 that it has obtained a 15-page research document showing "China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak," and that the document was "prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion" amid an investigation by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies of the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.

The Guardian, on contrast, cited intelligence sources in Australia that the 15-page dossier was "not culled from intelligence from the Five Eyes network," but "based on open source, public domain material."

One of the sources told The Guardian that they believed the information was "most likely" to have originally from the US, saying "My instinct is that it was a tool for building a counter-narrative and applying pressure to China."

(Source: Reuters)

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