Where were you February 7th? Where were you March 10th?  Were you working at your company or business office?  Were your kids in school?  Were you able to eat out, go to the gym and movies and travel internationally?

The answer to all of the above is likely yes.

Where were you in your knowledge about the coronavirus?  Where were other governments in their knowledge about the Wuhan Virus?  How many worldwide deaths had we experienced?  How many cases had we had in the US?  What actions had governors taken in response to the virus at that point?

All of these questions raise a very important point to any story:  Context.

Bob Woodward stepped out of his role as journalist this morning (again, if he hasn’t previously) and into the role of propagandist for Team Biden.  He openly allowed his work to become a talking point of a political campaign, all while failing to provide the most important thing for his report on his tapes:  Context.

The way Woodward released the tapes; The way he allowed for this to be spun up for the outrage cycle leading up to the election was because he knew that this would be played this way, not for journalistic purposes, but political purposes.  And this, all because he knew he was not highlighting the most important part of his report: Context.

Let’s not forget the steps Trump took, early in the fight against the Wuhan Virus.  When Trump ordered a travel ban to and from China, Biden called him a xenophobe.  When he suggested avoiding public gatherings in large cities, DeBlasio and Cuomo (responsible for more than 30% of US Wuhan Deaths in the Tri-State Area) told their people to go out and enjoy time out in February and March. All of this provides a super important thing:  Context.

When you release the tapes about Trump’s comments now, you place them into today’s context, not that of the timeframe in which they were made.  If I released tapes of Biden today, from recordings made during Biden’s “Racial Jungle” statements, everyone would point out they were from a long time ago, and that context provides for a real look at Biden’s work since then. Trump’s comments on-tape were made, not after 190,000 Americans had died. These comments weren’t made after 6 million positive tests.  When these comments were made, how many cases and deaths were there in the United States?  The answer is one case and zero deaths.  If we fast forward to March 10th, there were less than 300 cases nationally and only a couple dozen deaths. What makes this incredibly important?  CONTEXT.

The modern left drops these tapes as a portion of their ongoing media assault on Trump, ignoring in their comments (or burying them deep in stories) that the tapes were made February 7th and March 10th, not September 7th.  Trump didn’t callously state this now.  He cautiously commented then, while leftists fought him ideologically on every step he attempted to take in reducing the risk to Americans.  This wasn’t Trump chumming around with Woodward at a Labor Day barbeque thinking he was scamming Americans.  These comments were made before literally ANY other country took ANY action against COVID-19.  Trump may be a lot of things, but the lies the media now seeks to spread about him amount to libel and should be discarded as such.

Woodward’s disregard in requiring this context, and comparing Trump’s comments to other leaders (like Cuomo and DeBlasio) at the time make him complicit in this smear campaign.  After The Atlantic-Goldberg’s Tribute Concert to the Dan Rather style of reporting, and the subsequent bath he took on credibility you’d think that Woodward would have avoided the same mistake.  Allowing for the bloodthirsty media to contextualize comments into a context in which they were not made is, in a word, libel.

If we are honest about context, why did Woodward wait until September 9th, less than a month before mail ballots are delivered, to drop this story?  What “context” do Trump’s comments provide to anything he has said or done over the last several months?  Absent hindsight, what exactly would Democrats have done differently February 7th, or even March 10th (before any lockdowns) that Trump didn’t do? Dropping these tapes now has one purpose and one purpose alone: to affect the outcome of the election.

There’s a word for that: Propaganda.