Mick Hartley

Ashley Rindsberg, at Tablet, looks at The Lab Leak Fiasco. The sub-heading tells you the angle: "For over a year the media enforced falsehoods about the pandemic’s origins, never evaluated the evidence, never apologized, and was never held accountable".

We're familiar with the efforts of virologist Peter Daszak to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis, most notably with that letter to the Lancet in February last year when he and his fellow virology chums characterised any mention of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory – this without a hint from the Lancet that Daszak had a clear conflict of interest given his professional and commercial ties to the Wuhan virology lab. But as  Rindsberg tells it, the anti-lab-leak line was well established before then, and though Daszak has indeed played a significant role in the downplaying of the lab-leak theory, the press – notably the NYT and the Washington Post – had already established their line by then, often along with the dishonest claim that the lab-leak proponents were arguing that the lab leak was "the accidental result of biological weapons research": a claim that no one was making. When Trump then decided to talk of China's lab leak, the story was confirmed: not only was it a conspiracy theory, but it was all based on anti-Chinese racism. The question of Chinese money and influence over US institutions, including the media, was not discussed.

With Daszak leading the way, the media successfully couched lab leak as a conspiracy theory with roots in Trumpian politics, environmental denialism, and anti-Chinese sentiment. Together, these formed what we might call Daszak’s triangle, a mental model that made lab leak a social and political impossibility for anyone who did not want to be branded as an anti-science, right-wing xenophobe. Conversely, the “correct” (as distinct from “true”) theory of the pandemic’s origins was tied to animal spillover through the well-accepted notion of catastrophic environmental damage caused by human greed. The lead sentence of a September 2020 New York Times piece (which quoted extensively from Daszak) about a Times documentary, “Who’s to Blame for the Pandemic?” answered the question by stating: “The pandemic is your fault. Yes, yours.”

Daszak’s triangle made it impossible to even consider that partial responsibility for the origins of the pandemic might rest with the Chinese government. With reports of a global backlash of anti-Asian racism, some proponents of the anti-lab-leak narrative began claiming that any investigation into the origins and course of the pandemic was an act of pure bigotry. This narrative was able to conflate anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism (a very real and disturbing phenomenon) with a desire to question CCP claims concerning the pandemic’s origins.

In late February 2020, Slate published an article, “Where the Coronavirus Bioweapons Theory Really Came From,” which stated, “It does not matter how effectively we counter conspiracies claiming evidence that the virus shows signs of being engineered. That’s because the rumors of a lab escape or a bioweapon stem from historical amnesia, a caricatured villain, and good old-fashioned racism.”

As late as spring and summer of 2021—after the media had started to moderate its anti-lab-leak stance—journalists and commentators were still making the case that the theory is an inherently racist idea. In May, New York Times science and health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli tweeted (and later deleted): “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.” A month later, CNN medical analyst Leana Wen similarly tweeted that “speculation over the lab leak theory will increase anti-Asian hate.”

In other words, a perfect storm of hot-button topics – racism, environmental destruction, and hatred of Donald Trump – enabled the press to cover up the issues of Chinese responsibility for the pandemic, and of Chinese power in the heart of US institutions – with a smokecreen of self-righteous blather.

The day after Mandavilli’s tweet about the racist roots of lab leak, Nature published a news article stating that “rhetoric around an alleged lab leak has grown so toxic that it’s fueling online bullying of scientists and anti-Asian harassment in the United States …” The article provided no evidence for the latter claim, not even a glance at statistics involving cases of anti-Asian hate crimes in the relevant timeframe.

Why would a scientific journal (of all things) make a charged claim it couldn’t bother to support? The answer lies in the second half of the sentence quoted above. In addition to fueling anti-Asian hate, Nature averred that exploring lab leak risked “offending researchers and authorities in China whose cooperation is needed” [emphasis added]. In these few words—more ham-fisted but also more revealing than anything you’d find in a leading consumer news outlet—Nature drew back the curtain on not just the connection the media drew between lab leak and racism, but the media’s broader take on the role that China played in the pandemic.

As Paul D. Thacker, the investigative journalist who conducts extensive scientific, medical, and environmental reporting (including for many of the outlets mentioned above) and now authors the DisInformation Chronicle, explained to me in an email exchange:

When it comes to the science media, I rarely refer to many of them as “science reporters.” They are “science writers” because their job is to tell a story that makes science look good, not to do actual reporting. That’s why so many of them have done such a terrible job and called the lab leak a “conspiracy theory” or said that it was anti-Asian bias. Why is it anti-Asian to say that the pandemic started in a Wuhan lab, but not anti-Asian to say it started in a Wuhan wet market?

While this might explain the false narrative that emerged about lab leak in the science media, it still leaves us wondering why the consumer news media took much the same approach.

This question is at the core of what might be one of the greatest journalistic scandals of our generation. That there appears to be no accountability, self-reflection, or Iraq-WMD-style reckoning on the horizon only compounds the problem. If and when it does, we are likely to conclude that the false narrative around the pandemic’s origins represented a tipping point—a comprehensive failure in journalistic quality and mores in a time of national emergency, caused in large part by an overconcentration of corporate power in media, decades of economic and technological turbulence, and a disturbingly supine approach to an authoritarian hegemon. We might also discover that public trust in an institution essential to democracy was damaged beyond repair.

Worth reading in full.