Media’s Wuhan shame

Useful idiots or malicious liars?

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An awful lot of journalists were eager last year, maybe a little too eager, to dismiss the theory suggesting the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.

It was foolish then to reject the theory outright without any conclusive evidence. It looks even more foolish now, as evidence continues to mount showing the theory may actually be correct. PolitiFact especially looks foolish following the retraction of a “fact-check” that originally awarded a “pants on fire” rating to a doctor who claimed last year COVID-19 is a “man-made virus created in the lab.”

That the media's reckless rush to denounce the theory ultimately has suited China, which maintains it definitely isn't responsible for the pandemic that originated within its borders, is a detail that should not go ignored.

This begins with Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who was mocked and criticized last year after he said we shouldn't rule out the lab theory.

“We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” the senator said last February. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

Newsrooms pounced, conflating his remarks with a separate theory alleging the virus is a Chinese bioweapon.

Cotton is playing a “dangerous game,” said CNN.

It’s a “myth,” declared USA Today.

It’s a “fringe theory,” said the New York Times.

The Washington Post even accused Cotton of repeating an already “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.”

Later, in Sept. 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, repeated the lab theory on Fox News, saying, "I can present solid scientific evidence to our audience that this virus, COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 virus, actually is not from nature. It is a man-made virus created in the lab."

PolitiFact gave her a “pants on fire rating.”

In March, a New York Times report characterized the lab theory as "debunked.” Again, no one has proven any such thing. There is ample disagreement over the theory, but it certainly has not been “debunked.”

The New York Times’s report is careful to highlight an April 30, 2020, statement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that concurred “with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”

Conveniently absent from the New York Times article, however, is any mention of the part where the ODNI statement promises the intelligence community “will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Now, as many of the news organizations mentioned in the above have published reports recently conceding their initial assessments may have been premature, PolitiFact, which has as much egg on its face as anyone, has retracted its article awarding Dr. Yan a “pants on fire rating.”

“When this fact-check was first published in September 2020,” the group said in an editor’s note last week, “PolitiFact’s sources included researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed.”

The note adds, “For that reason, we are removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review. Currently, we consider the claim to be unsupported by evidence and in dispute.”

The original fact-check is still available on PolitiFact’s website for, as the group says, “transparency and archival purposes.”

The editor’s note fails to explain why, exactly, they chose to believe their sources over others. What hard evidence did PolitiFact’s sources provide showing Dr. Yan was indisputably wrong? Not even a little wrong — "pants on fire" wrong.

For that matter, what evidence did the Washington Post, USA Today, the New York Times, etc. have to conclude similarly that Cotton was spreading a “dangerous” and “debunked” conspiracy theory?

These media outlets were so certain the lab theory was wrong. They were so certain Cotton and others couldn’t possibly be right. They practically tripped over themselves to declare the theory a lie and a falsehood, even though they had no evidence proving anything of the sort.

“The possibility of a laboratory accident or inadvertent leak having caused the coronavirus outbreak must not be ignored,” the Washington Post’s editorial board said in January. “The genetic makeup of the coronavirus is similar to a variant found in bats. Research into bat coronaviruses was being conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which collected samples from a mine in Yunnan province in 2012 and 2013.”

It adds, “A credible investigation of how the pandemic began will require China to be completely open and transparent, including about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

This is exactly what Cotton had said in the first place. That the Washington Post’s first impulse was to conflate his theory with an entirely separate theory just to argue the same position staked out by Chinese authorities, a position that was already weak to begin with, and now appears totally indefensible, suggests all is not well with our vaunted Fourth Estate.

“What this comes down to," writes Hot Air's John Sexton, "is the fact that more than a year after the worst pandemic in a century, China’s story about where the virus originated has fallen apart, and they don’t claim to have a better one. Meanwhile, they continue to stifle and control any investigation or even reporting on the topic. It’s still just circumstantial, but they certainly behave as if they have something to hide."

I can see this. You can see this. Do our media?