From Tablet Magazine, November 15:
For over a year the media enforced falsehoods about the pandemic’s origins, never evaluated the evidence, never apologized, and was never held accountable
On Jan. 24, 2020, British peer-reviewed journal The Lancet published a study on a novel coronavirus it identified as 2019-nCoV. The study substantially contradicted the official Chinese government narrative about when and how the virus originated, placing its emergence months earlier. It also cast doubt on how the virus emerged. While the Chinese government had pointed to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, the now-infamous wet market in Wuhan, the paper found that at least one-third of initial cases—including “patient zero,” the first person known to have been sick with the virus—had no connection to the market whatsoever.
In the United States, the media’s initial response to The Lancet paper was largely sober and serious. The New York Times ran a Jan. 25 article connecting the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarianism to an assortment of prior botched efforts to manage major crises. The next day, Science magazine ran a story questioning the CCP narrative about the origins of the virus, citing The Lancet study’s discovery that of the 41 initial patients, 13 had no link to the wet market. The day after that, Vox ran a piece calling into question many of the assumptions formed in the earliest days of the pandemic, including those that had been shaped by Chinese officials.
On the heels of this spate of coverage from the Times, Science, Vox and others, a U.S. public official added a similar viewpoint. On Jan. 30, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton cited the same Lancet paper in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in the course of making what seemed to be—by the standards of contemporaneous mainstream and expert coverage—a fairly unobjectionable point:
We still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.The backlash to Cotton’s comment, swift and vociferous, would mark a turning point in the media’s approach to covering and investigating the origins of the virus. On Feb. 17, The New York Times and The Washington Post ran twin reports accusing Cotton of repeating a noncredible “fringe theory” about the origins of the virus, and taking particular issue with his comments on Fox News the previous day that “we don’t have evidence that this disease originated [in the Wuhan lab], but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says. And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.” Both stories claimed that there was a consensus among experts that the so-called lab leak theory had been comprehensively dismissed.
Cotton’s line at the time was difficult to distinguish from mainstream coverage of The Lancet paper, and from presidential candidate Joe Biden’s later insistence to CNN that “I would not be taking China’s word for it. I would insist that China allow our scientists in to make a hard determination of how it started, where it’s from, how far along it is. Because that is not happening now.” So what was wrong with what Cotton said?
While the top-line reporting was the same from the Post and the Times, each paper took a different approach to the nuances of the story. The Post conflated Cotton’s remarks about a possible accidental leak from a scientific lab with an assertion that the virus might have been connected to a Chinese bioweapons program—something Cotton never claimed, and which no statement from anyone on or off the record had even suggested. (The Post issued a correction to the article over a year later, removing the terms “debunked” and “conspiracy theory” and noting that “then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”)
The Post had previously stitched together claims about the lab leak theory with expert statements on the question of a possible bioweapons connection. Most prominently, in its first article on the topic on Jan. 29, 2020, the Post ran a report that included a quote by professor Richard Ebright, a renowned professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, directly after the article noted a “fringe theory” about how the virus could have been the “accidental result of biological weapons research.” “Based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus,” the Post quoted from Ebright.
Ebright himself, however, was never opposed to exploring the possibility of a scientific lab leak. A few days after the Post piece ran, Ebright tweeted out a story about Chinese researchers from other biosafety labs who sold their lab test animals to meat markets. At the bottom of his tweet, Ebright made a simple statement: “Coronavirus may have leaked from lab.”
The Post’s January article citing Ebright was specifically focused on the “fringe theory” that the virus was part of a Chinese bioweapons program. But in that piece, the Post included prominent mention of an article by the Daily Mail that reported on a 2014 Nature paper documenting serious safety issues at China’s scientific biosafety labs. Directly beneath that paragraph referencing the Daily Mail article on an accidental scientific lab leak, the Post focused on a Washington Times article explicitly theorizing that the virus might emerged from a Chinese bioweapons program.
By couching the Daily Mail article—one of the very first, if not the first major news story to raise the possibility of an accidental lab leak—in a piece about fringe theories with thinly backed claims of a bioweapons program, the Post set off a chain of events that would lead to the creation of the bioweapons straw man: the conflation of an accidental lab leak, a theory considered plausible by scientists, then and now, with the actually fringe bioweapons release theory.
Days later, on Feb. 4, 2020, Business Insider’s David Choi picked up this thread, injecting Cotton into the picture by connecting his Senate remarks—which had made no mention of China’s biowarfare program—to “conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins—including one that says the virus ‘originated in lab [sic] linked to China’s biowarfare program.’”....
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