The same pattern applied to the Media’s coverage of Russiagate too.
And those of us who are JFK assassination skeptics or CT’ers could say that that kind of behavior in the media has gone on for decades.
Whether it’s Covid, Iraq’s WMDs, Climate Science, or the JFK murder investigations, the Mainstream Media for some reason tends to try to limit the boundaries of what is legit to discuss and tries to discredit narratives or ideas that they don’t like or that goes against mainstream consensus.
Because the Media hates Trump so much, it was easy to dismiss the Lab Leak theory as just another conspiracy theory when he was President.
Now that a few mainstream reporters and some scientists have endorsed the idea that the theory is at least plausible and Trump is no longer President, the media’s consensus has shifted.
Because I have kept an open mind from day one, I never ruled out the Lab Leak as a plausible event even while I think a natural origin is the most likely explanation…
"The media hates Trump" :D :D :D
Same poor excuse right wingers use to excuse his corruption and criminality...blame the media....really pathetic. The purpose of the media is to investigate crime and corruption. Right wingers don't like when their orange messiah's crimes are brought to light so they use the same bogus talking points attempting to dismiss the charges.
It was Criminal Donald who dubbed the mainstream media "the enemy of the people" which is a Hitler Nazi tactic to eradicate the free press in order to install a propaganda state run media which all dictators establish. And that's exactly what we have with right wing AM radio, Faux Propaganda, OAN, and NewsMax pushing fake news and dangerous lies.
The "lab leak" theory was dismissed by scientists and government officials and the press reported on it. Far right wing conspiracy theorists pushed the "lab leak" theory in order to absolve Criminal Donald of his purposeful neglect of the worst virus in history.
It really doesn't matter how COVID-19 came about, what matters is what was done to prevent the virus from devastating the United States of America. The answer is that nothing was done to prepare citizens of our country to combat this virus. Criminal Donald knew about COVID-19 since November 2019 and did nothing to prepare or protect Americans until the virus was out of control in major U.S. cities.
Right out of the gate Criminal Donald, his corrupt officials, and the right wing media made the virus political calling it "a hoax". They also lied telling us it "was low risk", "contained", or "the virus will never come here". All were lies which allowed millions of people to become infected and hundreds of thousands of people to die from the virus.
The right wingers viciously attacked the use of wearing masks and social distancing to help prevent the spread of the virus. They also stormed State Capitol buildings in order to pressure Governors to end stay at home orders which helped saved lives. Now they are attacking the vaccine and spreading lies with their fake news.
The right caused this entire disaster to become more devastating than it should have been. If President Biden was in charge from the start COVID-19 would not have been as bad as it was.
A lot of folks in the Mainstream Media disliked Trump so much that they weren’t able to report on his Presidency objectively.
That is true and likely an understatement. The mainstream media and political establishment (both dems and repubs) hated Trump so much that they didn't care whether a story was true or not. The ends justified the means. Trump was deemed to be such a monster that anything was acceptable to harm him. So they knowingly conjured up and promoted false narratives with no concern for the facts. Anyone who questioned those narratives was shouted down as a racist or conspiracy theorist. Even when the conspiracy theory was being touted by media (i.e. Russian collusion).
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Republicans are more prone to believe the media is bias (the last hold-outs being taken out with Trump's "fake news" jargon). Since the days of Billy Graham, many Republicans found themselves conditioned by the evangelical movement to accept and obey the words of a wizened "messiah" should he/she appear. No fallback to a Bush, McCain or Romney. Politics is now a religious, spiritual existential experience the Republicans can't compartmentalize. It's like the Catholic Church making war and conducting crusades in olden times, something they wouldn't dream of doing today.
While the "left" media seems to have more outlets (because the Left is diverse), the Conservative outlets will sometimes have disproportionate viewers (Fox News, for example, dominates the evening cable ratings).
Of course, all these media outlets (and their consumers) perceive themselves as unbiased, which probably doesn't exist in no one.
A lot of folks in the Mainstream Media disliked Trump so much that they weren’t able to report on his Presidency objectively.That's most definitely true as I see it too and why part of cause for the failure to fairly report on the "lab leak" hypothesis, to dismiss it almost immediately, occurred. If the right wing media is so influential then why was this lab leak theory essentially dismissed for so long? But it was Senator Cotton more than Trump who was raising this question well before Trump did. It wasn't just anti-Trump thinking that led to this failure.
I say this as someone who didn’t vote for Trump and thought he was a lousy President.
That's most definitely true as I see it too and part of the failure to fairly report on the "lab leak" theory, to dismiss it almost immediately, was caused by this. If the right wing media is so influential then why was this lab leak theory essentially dismissed for so long? But it was Senator Cotton more than Trump who was raising this question well before Trump did. It wasn't just anti-Trump thinking that led to this.
But I think as Yglesias points out it goes beyond the dislike of Trump (who was a lousy president who deserved most, not all, but most of the negative press). The question he asks is do we have a media, e.g,. the major media entities, that promote a "false consensus" on critical issues because they "talk to themselves" and live in bubbles where that consensus is re-enforced? There isn't sufficient self-examination of that "consensus" view?
I think it was certainly true on this theory. To be non-partisan, it was also true on the Iraq WMD question about 20 years ago. And it was also true, in a different way, 55+ years ago with the media's reporting on the JFK assassination. There wasn't much criticism of the Warren Report at that time. It changed over the years; but this was a pre-Vietnam/pre-Watergate media that was much too willing to accept the government's statements.
On social media, most of the Liberal Media personalities dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop leaks as "Russian disinfo" or potentially false information.
I can't find where it's been determined the laptop was Hunter's and that nothing was done to its contents while it was out of his possession.
The computer repair shop owner is John Paul Mac Isaac, an avid Trump supporter, who sued Twitter for $500,000,000 last December. So much for their love of free speech.
Hunter literally said recently that the Laptop “may” be his.Yep, the story was that the mainstream media - the major outlets - refused to cover the story. And social media banned people from linking to the NY Post story. And the NY Post was banned by Twitter and Facebook from linking to their story. This nonsense that it wasn't "proven" and therefore couldn't be mentioned is absurd. By that standard half of the stories we discuss wouldn't be allowed to be mentioned. JFK assassination anyone?
The DEA found a second Laptop belonging to Hunter during a drug bust of a doctor in Massachusetts.
The Delaware repair shop guy’s story is weird but so far, everything he has said checks out. No one can argue that he isn’t credible or that the FBI didn’t take the Laptop into custody. He literally has a receipt from the FBI’s Baltimore office.
Granted, people SHOULD be skeptical of the NY Post and Rudy Giuliani but the Center-Left and Liberal Media’s disinterest in even reporting on the stuff that was confirmed as accurate was a bad look in terms of proving that they’re not totally biased…
Hunter literally said recently that the Laptop “may” be his.
The DEA found a second Laptop belonging to Hunter during a drug bust of a doctor in Massachusetts.
The Delaware repair shop guy’s story is weird but so far, everything he has said checks out. No one can argue that he isn’t credible or that the FBI didn’t take the Laptop into custody. He literally has a receipt from the FBI’s Baltimore office.
Granted, people SHOULD be skeptical of the NY Post and Rudy Giuliani but the Center-Left and Liberal Media’s disinterest in even reporting on the stuff that was confirmed as accurate was a bad look in terms of proving that they’re not totally biased…
Something seriously wrong is going on here but it appears that if the "right" people are being silenced it's okay. It's not. Today it's them, tomorrow it's you.
That's quite a cherry-pick, for a fellow who's "on to" the media doing deceitful things.
"Was that your laptop?" she asked.
"For real, I don't know," Hunter replied.
"I know. But you know that, this isn’t ..."
"But my point is, I really don't know. The answer is, that's the truthful answer."
"You don't know, yes or no, if the laptop was yours?"
"I don't have any idea. No idea whether or not …"
"So, could have been yours?"
"Of course, certainly," Hunter said.
You're talking about hindsight. Last fall, all they had to work with was the Giuliani "Four Seasons" sideshow.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory
"The experts all agreed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not a deliberate weaponization of a previously known virus and that it had no obvious signs of lab manipulation (more details below). They noted that blood sampling showed that brief “spillovers” of animal viruses into humans happen often without causing large outbreaks. Therefore, they argued, the odds were that this was another virus that got lucky, like SARS and MERS and the 2009 pandemic flu: it had dwelled long enough inside a civet or camel or pig or something to infect human-like cells, and then had hit the big city.
For about a year, that was the general wisdom among science writers. The “lab-leak theory” migrated back to the far right where it had started — championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion. It was tarred by the fact that everyone backing it seemed to hate not just Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party, but even the Chinese themselves. It spawned racist rumors like “Chinese labs sell their dead experimental animals in food markets.”
The former NY Times Covid reporter explains why he didn't address the Lab Leak theories until recently:I think that's called an "admission against interest."
https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d
I think that's called an "admission against interest."
There were all kinds of flags indicating that the investigations - including the one by WHO - were shams. Even the head of WHO, not known for challenging Beijing, said it was not sufficient. And that was months ago. It was never, as I now see it, a far fetched theory only held by Qanon crackpots.
A side story to this is that we thought that opening up China to the rest of the world, to the west, would change its internal policies. That economic liberalization would create political liberalization. That hasn't worked. Instead of changing them, it's changed us. The government - the Party really - is using this opening up to push its interest and make changes in us instead.
The Lab Leak theory can't be ruled out until we know more about how or when the virus jumped from animals to humans. However, there's not a shred of solid evidence so far supporting that theory.We're now running the risk of over compensating and running too quickly with the lab leak theory. And relying on, in part, the same intelligence that gave us Iraqi WMDs. We need to be as skeptical, as you say, of the lab leak theory as we should be with the natural explanation. With the exception of a few usual suspects on Fox, the media have been generally calm. But it's early.
The circumstantial evidence is obvious. A lab that studies coronaviruses happens to be located where the first major outbreak happened. But despite a year and a half of Intelligence agencies and scientists looking into the virus' origins, there's no solid evidence that it escaped from a Lab. Also, history shows that where a new virus happens to be discovered isn't always where the virus originated. For example, the Spanish Flu was discovered by Spain but originated in either Kansas or Mexico. It seems plausible that Covid originated somewhere else in China before finding it's way to a major city like Wuhan. There's genetic evidence and circumstantial evidence backing the view that Wuhan isn't the first place where Covid existed. It's more a question of, was the virus brought to Wuhan and released accidentally by Virus researchers? Or did it get there via the Wet Markets where exotic wild animals are sold?
The CIA in 2020 told the Trump administration that they had no evidence that the Chinese believe it leaked from a lab. By that, I assume they mean, Chinese officials aren't saying anything privately that contradicts their claim that it didn't leak from one of their Bio-research Labs:
-----------
Anthony Ruggiero, the head of the National Security Council’s bureau tracking weapons of mass destruction, expressed frustration during one videoconference in January that the C.I.A. was unable to get behind any theory of the outbreak’s origin. C.I.A. analysts responded that they simply did not have the evidence to support any one theory with high confidence at the time, according to people familiar with the conversation.
The C.I.A.’s judgment was based in part on the fact that no signs had emerged that the Chinese government believed the outbreak came from a lab. The Chinese government has vigorously denied that the virus leaked from a lab while pushing disinformation on its origins, including suggesting that the American military created it…
In a statement released earlier on Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that 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.”
Intelligence agencies, the statement said, concur “with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/politics/trump-administration-intelligence-coronavirus-china.html
----------
The Intelligence community's assessments haven't changed. Biden's ODNI says they don't know when or how Covid first transmitted to humans.
There have been Lab Leaks in China in the recent past but we know about them and they all were contained (as far as we know). There's no evidence that the previous Lab Leaks of SARS led to a pandemic.
The Chinese government is very secretive most of the time so their secrecy alone shouldn't be reason to assume they know more about the origins of Covid than they've said publicly. And I agree that the Chinese government doesn't help matters by spreading their own theories about how the virus may have originated in the US.
We can't ignore the fact that tensions between the US and China are as high as they've been since the 1970s. The Chinese likely don't believe the US is acting in good faith in the calls for more investigations.
It took 15 years or so for the Chinese to identify the source of the 2002 SARS outbreak and that outbreak had a connection to China's Wet Markets too. It could take as long or longer to find the source of the Covid-19 outbreak. Much of the research on that stuff happens in caves around remote parts of China. So while I find the Lab Leak theory to be plausible, it doesn't strike me as weird that the Chinese still don't know where the virus came from.
It's perfectly fine to speculate on the Lab Leak theory based on the circumstantial evidence. Lab leaks happen all over the world, including in the US and China. I agree that the mainstream media shouldn't have dismissed it entirely as a wacky conspiracy theory. Hopefully journalists and news editors learn lessons from this but I doubt they will...
We're now running the risk of over compensating and running too quickly with the lab leak theory. And relying on, in part, the same intelligence that gave us Iraqi WMDs. We need to be as skeptical, as you say, of the lab leak theory as we should be with the natural explanation. With the exception of a few usual suspects on Fox, the media have been generally calm. But it's early.
Reportedly, from the NY Times story, there's "a raft of still-unexamined evidence that required additional computer analysis that might shed light on the mystery." Swell, just swell. We're spending over $100 billion a year for this?
As to the origins: If it didn't come from a wet market and if the Chinese have been unable to find another animal that carries the virus, then what's the origin? And where did Patient Zero contract it and how? What's the most logical explanation at this point? Yes, this is why I'm not a scientist, trained to carefully weigh things and follow the scientific method of exhausting all possibilities. Maybe it was some person who had pet bats and got if from one of them.
In any case, back to my original post about how the media may be getting into bubbles and only considering sources that re-enforce their prejudices. It certainly seemed to have happened here.
Isn't this really about Right-Wingers wanting protection for their ongoing, increasingly-hostile demeaning comments about blacks, ethics, women and the poor?No, this is about my original post and Yglesias's observations about the lab leak theory. And then secondarily about the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Josh Rogin, a reporter for the Washington Post and someone who has been, almost by himself, covering/reporting the "lab leak" theory from the beginning - from early 2020 - has a very tough twitter thread about the failure of his fellow reporters on this story. He's not going to very popular with them.
Rogin:
#1: "All these reporters scrambling to defend their own records on the lab leak theory are exposing their own hypocrisy & ignoring their basic error. Just report the facts. Don’t act like its your job to tell us whats ok to think or talk about. Own up to it when you fail your readers."
#2: "Also, the lab leak theory didn’t change. It didn’t suddenly become credible. It didn’t jump from crazy to reasonable. The theory has always been the same. The people who got it wrong changed their minds. They are writing about themselves, with zero self awareness."
#3: "Most MSM reporters didn’t “ignore” the lab leak theory, they actively crapped all over it for over a year while pretending to be objective out of a toxic mix of confirmation bias, source bias (their scientist sources lied to them), group think, TDS and general incompetence."
I think this is a bit overly harsh especially #2. The evidence for this has changed, we have learned much more from last year. About the wet markets in particular. So this is, I think, not completely fair or accurate.
Link here: https://twitter.com/joshrogin/status/1398661632193089536
A lot of folks in the Mainstream Media disliked Trump so much that they weren’t able to report on his Presidency objectively.
I say this as someone who didn’t vote for Trump and thought he was a lousy President.
Yep, the story was that the mainstream media - the major outlets - refused to cover the story. And social media banned people from linking to the NY Post story. And the NY Post was banned by Twitter and Facebook from linking to their story. This nonsense that it wasn't "proven" and therefore couldn't be mentioned is absurd. By that standard half of the stories we discuss wouldn't be allowed to be mentioned. JFK assassination anyone?
The Russian collusion story wasn't proven, especially the Steele Dossier part of it. The Russian bounty story wasn't proven. And yet those weren't banned. Just until two days ago Facebook banned people from mentioning the "lab leak" theory behind the pandemic.
Something seriously wrong is going on here but it appears that if the "right" people are being silenced it's okay. It's not. Today it's them, tomorrow it's you.
U.S. Senate report goes beyond Mueller to lay bare Trump campaign's Russia links
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/18/donald-trump-us-senate-report-russia-campaign
COVID's origin is still inconclusive, according to an unclassified intelligence report publicly released Friday.
Driving the news: Chinese officials had no knowledge of the virus prior to its initial outbreak, according to the report, though it doesn't rule out the lab leak or animal transmission theories. The intelligence community "remains divided."
What they're saying: COVID was "probably" not developed as a biological weapon or genetically engineered, but the two dominant theories — that it came from a lab leak or was naturally transmitted from an animal — remain plausible, per the report.
The same pattern applied to the Media’s coverage of Russiagate too.
And those of us who are JFK assassination skeptics or CT’ers could say that that kind of behavior in the media has gone on for decades.
Whether it’s Covid, Iraq’s WMDs, Climate Science, or the JFK murder investigations, the Mainstream Media for some reason tends to try to limit the boundaries of what is legit to discuss and tries to discredit narratives or ideas that they don’t like or that goes against mainstream consensus.
Because the Media hates Trump so much, it was easy to dismiss the Lab Leak theory as just another conspiracy theory when he was President.
Now that a few mainstream reporters and some scientists have endorsed the idea that the theory is at least plausible and Trump is no longer President, the media’s consensus has shifted.
Because I have kept an open mind from day one, I never ruled out the Lab Leak as a plausible event even while I think a natural origin is the most likely explanation…
Not surprising that Biden’s inquiry into the origins of Covid came back inconclusive.
Summary of the ODNI report -
https://www.axios.com/report-covid-origin-inconclusive-900d4340-2267-4eba-a9ec-e2fc951ff921.html