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Questions

1. Tone is the attitude a cartoonist takes towards a subject. Which pair of words best describes the tone of this cartoon?
a) alarmed/horrified
b) exasperated/irritated
c) resigned/defeated
d) light-hearted/humorous

2. Gary Larson created his Far Side cartoons between 1980-1995. What current news event does this cartoon (created more than 25 years ago) illustrate?


Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the answers.

Cartoon by Gary Larson

Answers

1. d) light-hearted/humorous

2. In early 2020, soon after Covid-19 spread to the U.S., President Trump and others suggested that the Covid-19 virus came from a lab leak (and not spread naturally from bats to humans as the Chinese Communist government claimed). The media was quick to call Trump’s assertion a “conspiracy theory” and a “debunked theory”; Facebook and other social media censored/banned/blocked any posts suggesting the Covid-19 virus had not spread naturally.

New evidence has now been revealed that supports Trump’s assertion that the Covid-19 virus was accidentally spread from the Wuhan lab in China.

  • Throughout 2020, then-President Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Senator Tom Cotton and others asserted that the Covid-19 virus came from a lab leak – and was not spread naturally from bats as the Chinese Communist government and Dr. Fauci suggested. The media dismissed the president’s assertion and even published articles portraying Trump as promoting a “conspiracy theory.”
  • The Wall Street Journal reported last week that three virologists from the Wuhan lab had been hospitalized with covid-like symptoms in Nov. 2019, a month before China reported the first cases of COVID-19 (indicating the strong possibility that covi-19 leaked from the lab).
  • World Health Organization (WHO) director Tedros Adhanom (who is known to be under China’s control) then had to announce that his organization’s investigative team, which dismissed the lab-leak theory as unlikely, had not sufficiently investigated the possibility.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci and other prominent U.S. health officials then admitted that they lacked the information necessary to rule out a lab-leak.
  • Following the WSJ report and the reversal of the WHO and Fauci, as well as the release of hundreds of Dr. Fauci’s emails which prove he knew a lot more than he said, the media has reversed its reporting to acknowledge the strong possibility that the covid virus was indeed leaked from the Wuhan lab.
  • After refuting it for months, the Biden administration accepted the theory as plausible. President Biden has subsequently directed U.S. intelligence agencies to determine the likely cause of the virus and report their findings within 90 days.
  • Last week, Facebook announced it will no longer remove or flag as “misinformation” content referencing the lab-leak theory after doing so for more than a year.