Over there in The Guardian columnist Thomas Frank has zeroed in on the real Covid problem. The headline:
If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake
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In which Frank says, in part, this:
“If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.
Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.”
Mr. Frank is right. And no better example of what he calls the “self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing” can be found than over there in a February 2020 edition of The Washington Post.
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The headline:
Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked
The Post story by reporter Paulina Firozi says this:
“Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) repeated a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China.
…In response to Cotton’s remarks, as well as in previous interviews with The Washington Post, numerous experts dismissed the possibility the coronavirus may be man-made.
‘There’s absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered,’ said Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University. ‘The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.’
Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it is ‘highly unlikely’ the general population was exposed to a virus through an accident at a lab.
‘We don’t have any evidence for that,’ said Narang, a political science professor with a background in chemical engineering.
‘It’s a skip in logic to say it’s a bioweapon that the Chinese developed and intentionally deployed, or even unintentionally deployed,’ Narang said.”
Got that? A reporter for The Washington Post was confidently assured that the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan lab was a “fringe theory.” To confirm this she spoke to “numerous experts” including “a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University” and an “associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology” who is a “political science professor with a background in chemical engineering.”
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Thus reassured, reporter Firozi, took after Senator Tom Cotton for pushing a “coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.”
Except, of course, it was neither a “conspiracy theory” nor was it “debunked.” Now that President Biden has ordered an investigation into the lab leak possibility and Dr. Anthony Fauci has allowed that it is “highly likely” this is exactly what happened, The Post has felt to issue…ahem…cough cough…a “correction.” It reads:
“Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”
Or in other words? Oops.
As Bret Stephens of The New York Times has pointed out, what was really going on with this narrative was this:
“But the overall shape of the media narrative was clear. On one side were experts at places like the World Health Organization: knowledgeable, incorruptible, authoritative, noble. On the other were a bunch of right-wing yahoos pushing a risible fantasy with xenophobic overtones in order to deflect attention from the Trump administration’s mishandling of the crisis.
…Good journalism, like good science, should follow evidence, not narratives. It should pay as much heed to intelligent gadflies as it does to eminent authorities. And it should never treat honest disagreement as moral heresy.
Anyone wondering why so many people have become so hostile to the pronouncements of public-health officials and science journalists should draw the appropriate conclusion from this story. When lecturing the public about the dangers of misinformation, it’s best not to peddle it yourself.”
To again remind of what The Guardian’s Thomas Frank has said, this one episode alone from The Washington Post is the very epitome of yet another mainstream media disaster – fake news –
“… brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.”
Exactly.
