I wonder how many people there are like me who considered themselves lifelong left-leaning Democrats and then were horrified by the left wing's reaction to COVID and now consider themselves to be centrists. Sure Trump was still an idiot about the whole thing, but the hypocrisy, ludicrous grandstanding and outright panic from politicians and the media on the left was arguably worse. I'll never forget the NYT publishing articles basically cheering on the spread of COVID in the southern states because we weren't adequately panicking for their standards. In the meantime, my kids in South Carolina have been in school all year, there haven't been any serious consequences of keeping the schools open, unemployment is low and in general COVID has been no worse down here then in other places that banned people from going out in boats and commissioned posters of their self-aggrandizing governors. I miss level-headed people on both the left and right, but based on the reaction to COVID, the closest thing I saw was certain Republican governors in the South.
Isn't the most obvious explanation for this that amid the barrage of self-interested misinformation and outright lies from the Trump administration, a lot of journalists assumed that the lab leak theory was just another one? sure maybe they overcorrected in this instance, but when you are reporting on a president who just funnels nonsense allegations out by the bucketload every day, you are going to occasionally categorise something that way that turns out to be not quite as clear cut.
Its not really that surprising from this author that his explanation chooses to focus on the terrible threat of social justice journalism as the primary problem, but omitting the context in which the allegation was made was pretty sloppy. Yes we should aspire for some journalists at least to aim at impartiality, but if you made a list of the worst and most consequential partisan media errors of the last couple of years, youd find it hard to put this one in the top 20 imho, so I cant see how it really merits being presented as so significant
I wish Tom Cotton was from Arizona, but, alas, he’s from Arkansas. Getting this fact wrong at the top of your article shines doubt on the validity of your opinion. A tragic mistake in Wuhan does not mean it was intentional malfeasance.
As was suggested by someone at Substack, when you exclude extraneous information and focus on all of the knowns (Occam's Razor), the lab leak hypothesis is the only viable explanation for COVID 19 at this point. Journalism schools teach progressive revolutionary cultural Marxist ideology instead of empiricism and critical thinking skills. The media's entire approach to COVID 19 has been based on ad hominem thinking: if Trump supports or advances a position, its a rightwing conspiracy theory, if Trump-haters promote a position or theory, its science and settled fact. Likewise, a time-tested and favorite woke canard is criticism of the CCP and the mandarins in Beijing or the progressive future of humanity is Sinophobia and nativism. The easiest way to show the left the fallacy of ad hominem logic is to give them a counter example, i.e. do they bash Russia and Putin based on hatred of Christianity and proof that communism is a failed civic?
This was more than a media failure but gross media malpractice. All the circumstantial evidence in support of a lab origin (accidental or otherwise) has been extremely significant from the beginning - the pandemic starting with a couple miles of the virology lab reportedly engaged in "gain of function" research and prior concerns regarding lab safety there, the natural habitat of the possible natural animal reservoir over 700 miles away and a massive coverup and obstruction of investigations by the Chinese government. Unfortunately, the media likely allowed its left wing political bias affect its reporting. The Left needed to portray Trump as the ultimate villain and couldn't afford a real alternative villain. The excuses made here and elsewhere for the media's malfeasance are beyond ridiculous. Trump is probably no more dishonest than any other politician and whether any less than honest politician supports a certain idea, people need to think for themselves.
Group-Think In the "Main-Stream-Media" (MSM) has been a fact of life in America for the last 30 years. But it was the Trump administration and the MSM hatred of it. That freed the MSM from even considering "objectivity" and "proof of concept" as an objective in reporting.
Now the MSM are simply "propagandists" that promote "Washington Group-Think" in a ongoing stream. That is what happens when the MSM is controlled by just a few corporations. Which are controlled by the Federal Government. Much like the MSM was controlled in the USSR.
Except controlled by International Corporate Capitalists in America. Not Marxists in the USSR.
There are two possibilities for the Wuhan lab's involvement. One is that the strain was altered or engineered in the Wuhan lab. The sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 doesn't have any of the 'tool marks' you'd expect from that case, and it's been dismissed by serious scientists.
The other possibility is that the Wuhan lab collected something in the wild with the potential to jump to humans, and it did, due to a failure of lab safety practices. The early reasoning was that that was unlikely; not because the lab didn't collect viruses that might do that; it did; nor because lab safety practices are perfect; they're not; but just because the potential exposure-space for such jumps in one lab (where they propagate the viruses, but also take precautions) is quite a lot smaller than the exposure space in all the wide world where people raise animals, poke into caves, haul carcasses to open-air markets, and generally muck about. While I think that's still a compelling statistical argument, it'd be nice if there'd been more transparency on the Chinese side, and they said 'here's all the virus stocks in the Wuhan lab, here's the sequencing data, we didn't find SARS-CoV-2.'
Wouldn't stop the conspiracy-nuts, of course; and wouldn't entirely erase doubt, because it's not that hard to omit that one one data-point; but you can never prove a negative. The press rightly dismissed case one, but the distinction between them hasn't necessarily been made clearly all the time; sometimes deliberately, sometimes just because.
There's a big difference between the virus being a natural virus that escaped from a lab where it was being studied and it being "man-made or manufactured".
Yes a major failure. One of many. I have a list of these I have compiled for my own entertainment. Some I have particularly enjoyed, in a dark way, were these: Universal media freak out over opening beaches in Florida in spring 2020. Accompanied by numerous photos claiming to show large crowds. I could see they were taken with a telephoto lens, which compresses everything in the field of view to make them seem very close together. I found the photographers site, and he had all the photos he had taken that day. Showing... people in small (family sized groups) WIDELY separate by yards.
There was the piece in a business magazine that reported a dramatic 30% spike in cases after Germany had loosened restrictions. The problem? They had loosened the restrictions on a friday and the spike was on a Tuesday. About a week short of the time necessary to actually see an effect, if there were one. The further problem - a second's look at reporting data would reveal that Tuesdays are ALWAYS high, because facilities do not report on Sunday, and Mondays reports are therefore always low, and Tuesdays always were catch up. Totally bogus.
More you ask? OK - A report in the respected (sarcasm there) NYTimes was about the unfortunate physician in Florida who contracted TTP (An autoimmune disease that destroys platelets) and died a few weeks after his vaccination. There was a clear implication of a causal relationship. The enterprising reporter (Me, not the NYT) can find the yearly incidence of TTP in the US per million and easily determine that the ~ 6 million people who had at that time been vaccinated would be expected, in the 2-3 months the vaccinations had been given, to have about 20-30 cases of TTP as natural incidence. This took me maybe 5 whole minutes to determine. Of course I alerted the NYT, and of course no reply of any sort. There was a similar report elsewhere of a 60 year old man who had a heart attack two days after his vaccination, again, with vaccination implied as a cause. As if 60 year old men should perhaps be immune to heart attacks also after vaccination?
The issue, of course, is that when they need to communicate something that is true, how can this be differentiated from their past numerous errors?
Folks, the US anthrax attacks of 2001, were (arguably) a 'lab leak'. These thinks happen. The fact that they happen, only shows that it is possible that CV-19 came from the Wuhan lab.
Perfectly phrased here: " The goal of journalism is to seek the truth. The consequences of telling the truth should be secondary to getting the truth out there in the first place . . . .'
To wit: NOTHING is about race, or skin color; EVERYTHING is about behavior, conduct, civility and obeying US LAW. Without that, we are no better than the Taliban.
Good article, except you are dead wrong here- "But until very recently, we could at least expect that the mainstream media would make a legitimate effort to seek the facts and report fairly,". This horribly slanted coverage has been going on for decades. Yes decades. I was done with the MSM when I saw how they handled the 2000 election and I'm not talking post election.
It's pretty hard to criticize the news media for "dishonesty" and abdicating their responsibility to seeking the truth when we've lived with the 24/7 lie-fest of Fox News and talk radio for decades. The damage they have done to our fellow citizens is obvious, both from their wildly extreme ideology which is now mainstream and, even more frightening, the events of January 6th.
I suppose journalists giving a pass to mostly peaceful protesters burning down Minneapolis last year was also a result of not believing the Trump administration? How tortured your reasoning.
I wonder how many people there are like me who considered themselves lifelong left-leaning Democrats and then were horrified by the left wing's reaction to COVID and now consider themselves to be centrists. Sure Trump was still an idiot about the whole thing, but the hypocrisy, ludicrous grandstanding and outright panic from politicians and the media on the left was arguably worse. I'll never forget the NYT publishing articles basically cheering on the spread of COVID in the southern states because we weren't adequately panicking for their standards. In the meantime, my kids in South Carolina have been in school all year, there haven't been any serious consequences of keeping the schools open, unemployment is low and in general COVID has been no worse down here then in other places that banned people from going out in boats and commissioned posters of their self-aggrandizing governors. I miss level-headed people on both the left and right, but based on the reaction to COVID, the closest thing I saw was certain Republican governors in the South.
To today’s corrupt journos I pose this question:
What is the alternative to truth?
Is it preferable?
Isn't the most obvious explanation for this that amid the barrage of self-interested misinformation and outright lies from the Trump administration, a lot of journalists assumed that the lab leak theory was just another one? sure maybe they overcorrected in this instance, but when you are reporting on a president who just funnels nonsense allegations out by the bucketload every day, you are going to occasionally categorise something that way that turns out to be not quite as clear cut.
Its not really that surprising from this author that his explanation chooses to focus on the terrible threat of social justice journalism as the primary problem, but omitting the context in which the allegation was made was pretty sloppy. Yes we should aspire for some journalists at least to aim at impartiality, but if you made a list of the worst and most consequential partisan media errors of the last couple of years, youd find it hard to put this one in the top 20 imho, so I cant see how it really merits being presented as so significant
I wish Tom Cotton was from Arizona, but, alas, he’s from Arkansas. Getting this fact wrong at the top of your article shines doubt on the validity of your opinion. A tragic mistake in Wuhan does not mean it was intentional malfeasance.
As was suggested by someone at Substack, when you exclude extraneous information and focus on all of the knowns (Occam's Razor), the lab leak hypothesis is the only viable explanation for COVID 19 at this point. Journalism schools teach progressive revolutionary cultural Marxist ideology instead of empiricism and critical thinking skills. The media's entire approach to COVID 19 has been based on ad hominem thinking: if Trump supports or advances a position, its a rightwing conspiracy theory, if Trump-haters promote a position or theory, its science and settled fact. Likewise, a time-tested and favorite woke canard is criticism of the CCP and the mandarins in Beijing or the progressive future of humanity is Sinophobia and nativism. The easiest way to show the left the fallacy of ad hominem logic is to give them a counter example, i.e. do they bash Russia and Putin based on hatred of Christianity and proof that communism is a failed civic?
This was more than a media failure but gross media malpractice. All the circumstantial evidence in support of a lab origin (accidental or otherwise) has been extremely significant from the beginning - the pandemic starting with a couple miles of the virology lab reportedly engaged in "gain of function" research and prior concerns regarding lab safety there, the natural habitat of the possible natural animal reservoir over 700 miles away and a massive coverup and obstruction of investigations by the Chinese government. Unfortunately, the media likely allowed its left wing political bias affect its reporting. The Left needed to portray Trump as the ultimate villain and couldn't afford a real alternative villain. The excuses made here and elsewhere for the media's malfeasance are beyond ridiculous. Trump is probably no more dishonest than any other politician and whether any less than honest politician supports a certain idea, people need to think for themselves.
Dixie Pixie9 min ago
Group-Think In the "Main-Stream-Media" (MSM) has been a fact of life in America for the last 30 years. But it was the Trump administration and the MSM hatred of it. That freed the MSM from even considering "objectivity" and "proof of concept" as an objective in reporting.
Now the MSM are simply "propagandists" that promote "Washington Group-Think" in a ongoing stream. That is what happens when the MSM is controlled by just a few corporations. Which are controlled by the Federal Government. Much like the MSM was controlled in the USSR.
Except controlled by International Corporate Capitalists in America. Not Marxists in the USSR.
There's a more-nuanced story to tell here.
There are two possibilities for the Wuhan lab's involvement. One is that the strain was altered or engineered in the Wuhan lab. The sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 doesn't have any of the 'tool marks' you'd expect from that case, and it's been dismissed by serious scientists.
The other possibility is that the Wuhan lab collected something in the wild with the potential to jump to humans, and it did, due to a failure of lab safety practices. The early reasoning was that that was unlikely; not because the lab didn't collect viruses that might do that; it did; nor because lab safety practices are perfect; they're not; but just because the potential exposure-space for such jumps in one lab (where they propagate the viruses, but also take precautions) is quite a lot smaller than the exposure space in all the wide world where people raise animals, poke into caves, haul carcasses to open-air markets, and generally muck about. While I think that's still a compelling statistical argument, it'd be nice if there'd been more transparency on the Chinese side, and they said 'here's all the virus stocks in the Wuhan lab, here's the sequencing data, we didn't find SARS-CoV-2.'
Wouldn't stop the conspiracy-nuts, of course; and wouldn't entirely erase doubt, because it's not that hard to omit that one one data-point; but you can never prove a negative. The press rightly dismissed case one, but the distinction between them hasn't necessarily been made clearly all the time; sometimes deliberately, sometimes just because.
There's a big difference between the virus being a natural virus that escaped from a lab where it was being studied and it being "man-made or manufactured".
Yes a major failure. One of many. I have a list of these I have compiled for my own entertainment. Some I have particularly enjoyed, in a dark way, were these: Universal media freak out over opening beaches in Florida in spring 2020. Accompanied by numerous photos claiming to show large crowds. I could see they were taken with a telephoto lens, which compresses everything in the field of view to make them seem very close together. I found the photographers site, and he had all the photos he had taken that day. Showing... people in small (family sized groups) WIDELY separate by yards.
There was the piece in a business magazine that reported a dramatic 30% spike in cases after Germany had loosened restrictions. The problem? They had loosened the restrictions on a friday and the spike was on a Tuesday. About a week short of the time necessary to actually see an effect, if there were one. The further problem - a second's look at reporting data would reveal that Tuesdays are ALWAYS high, because facilities do not report on Sunday, and Mondays reports are therefore always low, and Tuesdays always were catch up. Totally bogus.
More you ask? OK - A report in the respected (sarcasm there) NYTimes was about the unfortunate physician in Florida who contracted TTP (An autoimmune disease that destroys platelets) and died a few weeks after his vaccination. There was a clear implication of a causal relationship. The enterprising reporter (Me, not the NYT) can find the yearly incidence of TTP in the US per million and easily determine that the ~ 6 million people who had at that time been vaccinated would be expected, in the 2-3 months the vaccinations had been given, to have about 20-30 cases of TTP as natural incidence. This took me maybe 5 whole minutes to determine. Of course I alerted the NYT, and of course no reply of any sort. There was a similar report elsewhere of a 60 year old man who had a heart attack two days after his vaccination, again, with vaccination implied as a cause. As if 60 year old men should perhaps be immune to heart attacks also after vaccination?
The issue, of course, is that when they need to communicate something that is true, how can this be differentiated from their past numerous errors?
It can't.
Folks, the US anthrax attacks of 2001, were (arguably) a 'lab leak'. These thinks happen. The fact that they happen, only shows that it is possible that CV-19 came from the Wuhan lab.
Perfectly phrased here: " The goal of journalism is to seek the truth. The consequences of telling the truth should be secondary to getting the truth out there in the first place . . . .'
To wit: NOTHING is about race, or skin color; EVERYTHING is about behavior, conduct, civility and obeying US LAW. Without that, we are no better than the Taliban.
Good article, except you are dead wrong here- "But until very recently, we could at least expect that the mainstream media would make a legitimate effort to seek the facts and report fairly,". This horribly slanted coverage has been going on for decades. Yes decades. I was done with the MSM when I saw how they handled the 2000 election and I'm not talking post election.
It's pretty hard to criticize the news media for "dishonesty" and abdicating their responsibility to seeking the truth when we've lived with the 24/7 lie-fest of Fox News and talk radio for decades. The damage they have done to our fellow citizens is obvious, both from their wildly extreme ideology which is now mainstream and, even more frightening, the events of January 6th.
I suppose journalists giving a pass to mostly peaceful protesters burning down Minneapolis last year was also a result of not believing the Trump administration? How tortured your reasoning.