Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?

Contact Your Elected Officials

Were commercial relationships with China a factor?

The worldโ€™s verdict on the lab leak seems to be shifting. The Biden Administration now thinks there is a credible possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. WHO chief Tedros Adhanome Ghebreyesus has admitted that attempts to dismiss the hypothesis were โ€œprematureโ€. These are, of course, positive developments โ€” but they should also leave us astounded.

In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as โ€œracistโ€. The question we have to ask now is how, and why, did this happen?

To a great extent, I believe the answer lies with the worldโ€™s most powerful news outlet, the New York Times. At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCPโ€™s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paperโ€™s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trumpโ€™s travel ban to and from China as โ€œisolationistโ€. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of Chinaโ€™s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed Chinaโ€™s economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemicโ€™s origins. And it celebrated Chinaโ€™s success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCPโ€™s absurd mortality numbers at face value, reporting in August 2020 that 4,634 Chinese people died from the virus and, six months later, that there were 4,636 total deaths. That in a country of 1.4 billion people only two people died of Covid-19 in the half a year defies logic and common sense. Still, the Times legitimized the CCP numbers by printing them as hard fact.

Of course, over the past year newspapers across the world have fallen for the CCPโ€™s distorted Covid-19 narrative. And there is no evidence to suggest that the CCP did put pressure on the Times. But when it came to the lab leak debate, the Times was relentless. Starting in early 2020, when little was known about the virus โ€” and nothing about its origins โ€” the Times adopted a stridently anti-lab leak stance. In its first report on the topic, a February 17, 2020 article covering comments made by Sen. Tom Cotton, the Times stigmatised lab leak as a โ€œfringe theoryโ€. Once the story was published, its reporter took to Twitter to describe it as โ€œthe kind of conspiracy once reserved for the tinfoil hattersโ€.

About Ashley Rindsberg

Ashley Rindsberg is author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Timesโ€™ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

BY ASHLEY RINDSBERG

Read Full Article on UnHerd.com

The Thinking Conservative
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