This is how people who have been deceived react.
You did not see this reaction from the Pulitzer (pull-it-sir) winning Russia, Russia, Russia journos when their fabulist sources were exposed as liars. That's because the writers themselves were writing fiction and they knew it.
And the audience those WaPo and NYT writers were addressing? They knew it was all B.S. as well but decided the thing to do was post and re-post; tweet and re-tweet what the storytellers were pumping out. No recriminations, no "I trusted you and spread what you were writing and now I look like a fool for believing you."
Keep an eye out for a lack of normal human emotion; like Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn't bark the truth can be inferred from both positive and negative reactions.
Enough preaching, the game is afoot. From The Telegraph, March 26:
Former New York Times reporter said he became sceptical of hypothesis involving Wuhan laboratory after virologists said it wasn’t possible
A former New York Times journalist has attacked a group of leading scientists for “clearly” misleading him over the Covid lab-leak theory in the early days of the pandemic.
Donald McNeil Jr said he became sceptical of the hypothesis the virus was engineered in a Wuhan lab after several top epidemiological virologists insisted it wasn’t possible.
Mr McNeil Jr said their efforts to throw him “off track” influenced the newspaper’s coverage of the theory and likely contributed to the topic being “dropped” for a year.
However, the experts initially thought the lab leak theory was plausible but didn’t want to disclose so for political reasons, according to a raft of messages between them accidentally released by a US congressional committee last year.
In his book The Wisdom of Plagues, which looks back at 25 years covering pandemics, Mr McNeil Jr said the scientists “clearly misled me early on” and he was a “victim of deception”.
He said he was “disappointed, both in them and in myself, that I was so easily taken in”.
“It’s one thing to be lied to by a politician and fail to check it out. But on viral evolution, to whom do you go for a second opinion?”, he wrote.
“If Albert Einstein assured you that nuclear fission is harmless, whom would you trust to quote saying, ‘Einstein’s dead wrong?”
Mr McNeil Jr resigned from the New York Times in 2021 after the paper reprimanded him for repeating a racial slur used by a student in a discussion of whether that student should be suspended by their school.
Last year, private messages released by the US Oversight Committee revealed conversations between several scientists who penned a key paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020.
The paper, The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2, argued that a natural spillover event caused the pandemic and was instrumental in stifling debate into the origins of the virus.
Among the authors were British scientist Prof Andrew Rambaut, professor of molecular evolution at the University of Edinburgh, and first author Prof Kristian Andersen, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
The messages showed that in the weeks before publication the scientists had acknowledged that a laboratory leak was a possibility but were concerned about upsetting the Chinese.
Some of the messages also showed the researchers discussing how to respond to queries from Mr McNeil Jr about the origins of the virus.
Mr McNeil Jr emailed both Prof Rambaut and Prof Andersen on 6 February 2020 over a tip off that the government was trying to investigate the possibility the virus was made in a lab in Wuhan.
The scientists shared his emails on messaging platform Slack, with Professor Robert Garry writing Mr McNeil Jr was “very credible but like any reporter can be mislead [sic]”.
“Don... pretty much nailed it,” Prof Andersen added. “Let’s not tell him.” They told him the rumours were “demonstrably false” and 10 days later published Proximal Origins.
Discussing his response to another email from Mr McNeil Jr nine days later, Prof Andersen told his colleagues he had used “humour to deflect the fact I’m dismissing him” and added a “very deliberate” smiley face....
....MUCH MORE
