The gloating and dunking is valid and worthwhile. Millions of innocent people died and the media were complicit in a lot of it — mask, no mask, shaming, scolding, this and that.
The lab leak (if it happened, and it likely did) and how the WHO was complicit in covering it up (AND HOW THE US NIH AND DR FAUCI WERE ACTUALLY FUNDING THE G-o-F RESEARCH!!) contributes to the further erosion of the fifth estate and trust in public authorities. This is demonic and bad. Dunks must be had for the good of humanity.
And yes the US and PRC both must pay, and neither will.
Far be it from me to discourage shaming fraudsters, but I honestly don't know what difference acceptance of the lab leak theory would have made to saving lives. Unless you mean the millions of lives lost is linked to the shaming and scolding and not to denying the lab leak theory?
Honestly, aside from their hamfisted initial response, I don't know how the Chinese are really responsible. This was an American project that was moved to China only when gain of function research was outlawed in the US.
I hold the Chinese more culpable for refusing access to the lab records that would resolve all this.
I hope someone can explain *why* the lab leak theory was so forcefully opposed and mocked. I get Freddie linking that posture to a pro-Democrat bias. What I don't get is what the Democrats had to gain from denying the lab-leak theory.
What the Democrats had to gain is that Trump brought it up, and if Donald Trump said the sky was blue, we'd have every pundit in the WaPo and NYT telling us it's not.
It was an all out messaging war on Trump, whether he was right about X or wrong about X. It didn't matter.
They didn't realize, and probably still don't, that their credibility is threatened by their poor reporting. These reporters mostly don't understand science very well, and they despise Trump (understandably), so if Trump says one thing and one or two scientists say the opposite, that will get reported as a "scientific consensus" that what Trump said is wrong. The whole topic from then on will be viewed through an exclusively political lens -- anyone who suggests that Trump may have been right is assumed to be a partisan right-winger.
"reporters mostly don't understand science very well" - 25 years ago in college my fellow science majors and I would gather round the Science Times section every week and point and laugh at the mistakes both of fact and of interpretation. You have absolutely no idea how incredibly, laughably stupid reporters are, and it's not just limited to science.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Molecular Biology knows that manipulation of DNA & RNA leaves traces, which don't seem to be there in SARS2. So there's no evidence that this was engineered or weaponized. But it could be BOTH zoonotic AND escaped from a lab if someone got sloppy.
It's the conflation of "lab leak" with "engineered bioweapon" that was the wrong call, but then that's exactly what you would expect from ignorant and arrogant Ivy League Poli-Sci majors attempting to write about something more complicated than DC committee assignments.
Your analysis makes a lot of sense. It's a combination of ignorance and hubris. Corporate journalism selects for - and apologies for the crudeness here but it's the perfect descriptor - fart-sniffers. They're serious about credentials and prestige but they couldn't think their way out of a one-way street. They're deferential to personages and titles but can't detect virtue or malice when it's across the room from them. They're committed to science but couldn't read anything longer than an abstract. And above all, they care deeply about other journalists but couldn't pick a viewer or a reader out of a one-man lineup.
yeah, it's status seeking a la Veblen. My brother works on the marketing side at the times, and he's turned into one of the Pod People. He actually once said "Maggie Haberman has always been polite and pleasant to me" after one of my rants (as if that's even relevant to anything?).
Examples like that always fascinate me because it's not just the irrelevance but... what kind of mental model of the world is that? That if someone is a Good person, they do Good things, like be polite to marketers. If someone is a Bad person, they do Bad things, like kick puppies and tip badly. So if a Bad person does something Good this is cause for confusion or re-examination. I can't imagine going through life like that. It must be very, very confusing. Like if he's at a country club and some cartoonish ogre of a plutocrat holds open a door for him or buys him a drink, he's thinking "but gosh, I thought he was Bad!"
In "Hate, Inc." Taibbi confesses to the role he played (in the past now, so he says, and so far, he seems to have meant it) in getting to this dismal status quo in the press.
I'll confess, I don't have super negative feelings about him but I presumed many people in this comments section do, due to them being progressive and online.
Basically, I remember reading the book, and following Taibbi's current reporting at the same time. It was funny because in the book you had him talking about hysterias, using the example of the English media hysteria around mods versus rockers battles. (One of my favorite parts of the book). And online, you had Taibbi exaggerating about leftist vandals attacking statues based on perhaps two stories.
I didn't get mad at him or want to cancel him as much as I thought "Ahh I see what you're doing here Matt..."
There is some indication Fauci and other key deniers are connected to "gain of function" research (where scientists modify viruses to make them more deadly/infectious/what-have-you in order to understand them better). If so, it could potentially be embarrassing for them, I guess?
IDK, that's what some (I think Greenwald was one?) have hypothesized, but I haven't seen anyone really dig into it. I hope someone does.
"...if you only paid attention to all of the dunking going on you would be under the impression that we know for a fact that the virus emerged from a lab."
Well, it depends on one's reading comprehension skills. And maybe on what sources one chooses to read. I read Matt Yglesias's piece, and I've seen a few others, and all of them emphasize that we don't know if the virus came from the lab or not. The issues at this point are (1) certain elements of the left-leaning side of the media chose, either out of sloppiness or ineptitude, to discount the possibility of a lab origin, and (2) the Chinese government has not allowed a proper independent investigation. Both of these are worth noting. In connection with (1), it is particularly disturbing that the NYT's COVID report has been quoted as saying that we shouldn't talk about the possibility of a lab leak because the idea is racist -- an utterly idiotic statement.
I believe it went beyond discounting the possibility, to labeling the mention of it a conspiracy theory. Even words like "debunked" were thrown around.
Well, that is discounting it, just in a very aggressive and hostile sort of way. You're right, though, that they were clearly trying to shut down any discussion of the topic.
I don't understand why the media initially dismissing claims that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab is an example of pro-Democrat bias rather than not wanting to side with knee-jerk racism.
I work around a lot of people who talked about the “China virus” before we were all sent home. Maybe I could give them the benefit of the doubt that they were intellectually curious & were positing a notion for how the virus originated. I won’t though, because that is a garbage take.
You are surely projecting. Calling something "Wuhan Flu" is no more racist than, for example, referring to a disease that originated in Berlin "Berlin Flu" or a disease that originated in Strasbourg "Strasbourg Flu."
It's not surprising that racist people see racism everywhere. For the rest of us, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I, for one, would love to hear an explanation of why "China virus" or "Wuhan flu" are derogatory that doesn't apply equally well to "Ebola virus", "West Nile virus", "Lyme disease", "Middle East Respiratory Syndrome", "Spanish flu", and countless other terms based on the places where those diseases were first identified.
How is "Chinese people unleashed covid19 because they made a mistake while doing high-level virology research" more racist than "Chinese people unleashed covid19 because they butcher their meat in unsanitary conditions"?
I just straight up do not understand how the lab leak hypothesis is racist.
1) I would hesitate to blame “Chinese people” for the same reason I’m loath to blame “American people” for atrocities in Iraq. Technically correct? Absolutely. But it’s uncool to blame regular people for state actions.
2) That said, if today someone said “China accidentally unleashed Covid.” OK. Fair point. To call it a year ago was much less about thoughtful speculation than an opportunity to shit on a country where people are different than here. Some people here disagree with that because it’s easy to blame those lame ol’ democrats.
I mean, in both cases, it would be mistakes made by individual Chinese people, not the state itself acting, but I take your point.
Let me put it this way: "Covid happened because Chinese people eat weird, gross, unsanitary wild animals that they butcher in horrific fashion! Watch this video of them doing it!" is a social media post I saw multiple times in the early months of the pandemic. Despite the popularity of Asian cuisine in the US, "The Chinese eat gross things and hack up rats to put in their stew" or whatever is an existing stereotype of the Chinese that persists to this day.
"Covid happened because Chinese people are careless!" isn't...really a stereotype of Chinese people? At least not one I've come across. I've encountered stereotypes of plenty of other ethnic groups being incompetent/dumb/careless/lazy/what-have-you, but stereotypes about Chinese people are generally that they're ruthless and uncreative. I mean, I guess the bioweapon hypothesis (which does indeed seem to be pure conspiracy) could fit into that stereotype, but I don't see how the lab leak does.
I see your point & it’s reasonable. My response would be that I get someone saying “I suspect the virus leaked out of a Chinese lab.” I don’t think those ranting about the “Wuhan flu” a year ago was speaking from good faith though. It sounded a lot more like xenophobia to me. Hence why I think DeBoer’s contention that it was the media covering for democrats doesn’t ring true to me.
This seems like (yet another) instance of the tension between 'decoupling' and 'contextualizing'.
One interpretation of "Wuhan flu" is that it describes a virus that originated in Wuhan – this is decoupling. The 'contextualizing' interpretation is that "Wuhan flu" is xenophobia.
And _both_ interpretations could be true (and probably are)! But it's often very difficult to even _notice_ that both interpretations are possible and the 'contextualizing' interpretation seems to me to be the dominant mode (e.g. in 'the media'), which impedes discussing facts and theories/hypotheses that are even _possibly_ interpreted as 'bad' in the contextualizing mode. That's a real, and tragic, loss.
Though this was much, much smaller than the Capitol Riot or the lab leak story, I feel like the Jussie Smollett incident was a canary in the coal mine for this stuff.
That dude's story was ridiculous from Day 1. It made no sense, and everyone knew it. Yet so many politics-obsessed liberals practically wanted it to be true because it fed their outlook about the world.
Things suck right now. We have liberal media, whose job it is to protect the Democrats. And we have right-wing media, whose job it is to protect the Republicans. Principles and humility are gone.
Having partisan journalism isn't necessarily a problem if everyone knows the rules of the game. It also wouldn't be a problem if - as in the golden age of yellow journalism - there was still diversity of voice, with several papers in any city and often with different owners. Regional voices also still had primacy. Now there is no diversity of voice, ownership is hyper-concentrated, the news is the same from Key West to Kauai, and there is still the slightest veneer of prestige and balance. Granted the media has been doing its absolute best over the past six years to surrender what's left of their cachet, but tens of millions of people still think "well if this big shiny newspaper said it, I'm sure it's being reported in good faith and is based on something other than stenography."
If everyone knew where they stood and that the media was in the business of selling narratives, we'd be significantly better off than now. We have the worst of both worlds. A rotten, partisan system with a skinsuit of respectability.
>"the January 6th rioters were a bunch of idiot deadenders who, while deserving of the arrests and censure they have received, could not have taken control of a Chucky Cheese, let alone the US government."
True as far as it goes, but if they had found AOC in her hiding place, would they have harmed her? Assassinated her?
How about Nancy Pelosi? How about Mike Pence?
Are you really so sure that they would have just said "oh never mind" and walked away?
I concur that it's hard to know how to characterize January 6th which is why I would really like to see some kind of comprehensive account -- if not a commission then a Lawrence Wright book or longform piece in the New Yorker. It's crazy to me that people actually died for Trump's vanity and ego and I can imagine that it was pretty scary on that day in the Capitol such that ongoing anger and PTSD is warranted for the people who were doing their jobs. But I cannot watch CNN or MSNBC anymore (which is a good thing because they were always terrible but the Trump car crash was so hard to look away from) and when they harp on January 6th I feel it is embarrassing to the left or the Democratic party. And I do wonder if they had come across Mitt Romney if he had not been redirected what they might have done. Violence seems less likely than the kind of yelling that he was getting before and after the event, but the fact that people were armed and the mob sentiment was flying makes me wonder. If the insurrection had been from the left -- say a BLM or antifa led effort to shut down the Capitol for voting for something perceived to be racist (say national voter ID requirements) and a white Capitol police officer had shot a Black woman with a military service history under the same basic conditions that happened on the 6th I wonder what the media's reaction would have been? I am not saying that I think that the shot was unjustified by the protesters behavior, and I am pretty sure based on how I have viewed many of these police shootings under heightened conditions that I would not have felt in a position to judge the police officer, but I do think that the media coverage on CNN and MSNBC would not have been the same and I think that is not a great sign.
You're not going to get a comprehensive account because the Capitol Police are under no obligation to release the tens of thousands of hours of footage that they have, so they won't do it.
A Congressional subpoena would get all the video that is known to exist, recoverable, and not redacted for reasons of national security. In other words, it would get exactly what the police want it to, and no more. This is exactly why so many jurisdictions now many bodycam footage a matter of public record. That should be the default.
Precisely. I'm not sure why deBoer and Greenwald are so focused on the Sicknick story as somehow explosive proof of how evil the media is. Law enforcement first reported that he had died from the fire extinguisher, so that's what the NY Times reported. Then when that changed and it became clear that he actually died of a stroke after being pepper sprayed by a rioter, they updated their story. What is so evil about how this was reported?
I answered that question very simply and specifically: on January 8th, ProPublica reported that Sicknick's family had received a phone call from him THE NIGHT AFTER THE RIOT. Meaning that he could not possibly have had his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher. Yet members of the media reported that as fact for weeks afterwards. I'd say that's a major failing.
Also, there is literally no evidence that he was pepper sprayed himself, and no evidence that if he was he died from that. The medical examiner was quite clear in that regard.
Not to exonerate the thug with the bear spray (I've seen it called 'bear spray' - I'm not sure of the difference between that and the pepper spray) but what the video shows is some guy spraying a can with Sicknick in the vicinity, and then a separate video shows the well-fed officer of the law wandering around and rinsing his eyes. Would he be pouring water in his eyes were he not sprayed? We can be charitable and say he wasn't doing it for the cameras. It's almost unthinkable that he'd take such an action unless he had had his eyes irritated somehow. And the bear spray would certainly be the most likely culprit for that based on the tiny amount of footage that the Capitol Police have deigned to make available. (They have tens of thousands of hours of footage that none of us will ever see.)
But it's also fair to say that if he was sprayed, it was pretty damn light, and "he actually died of a stroke after being pepper sprayed by a rioter" is a hugely misleading way of framing it. If a light mist of irritant in the eyes led to strokes, police and rioter mortality would look a lot different. The framing is that one led to the other, that it's a direct causal relationship. (In fact the only directly attributable death that day came when an unarmed woman was shot in the neck by an unknown party as she tried to crawl through a door, but everyone - Donald Trump most of all - has forgotten about that one.)
Federal prosecutors wrote in court filings that the guy who did the spraying had both pepper spray and bear spray on his belt, but no one knows which of those he used when he sprayed Sicknick. Bear spray is the same thing as pepper spray, but more concentrated and not meant to be used on humans.
Nothing I said was incorrect or misleading. He was pepper sprayed and then had a stroke the next day. Obviously I'm not a doctor and I can't say whether this was correlation or causation. Of course it's possible that he was sprayed, washed out the spray, was just fine, and then just happened to have a stroke the next day. WaPo quoted the medical examiner saying "all that transpired played a role in his condition." So who knows.
It is misleading. If I said "I bought a lotto ticket - next thing you know I'm driving a Labmo" it's obvious what I'm implying. If it turns out I actually stole the car, I've poisoned the well.
I'm sure many other things also played a role in his condition, that's the point. To eliminate things like lifestyle, history on a stressful job and so on is a rhetorical attempt to make a complex situation more linear than it is.
Also thank you for explaining the spray difference.
"Law enforcement first reported that he had died from the fire extinguisher, so that's what the NY Times reported."
Of course it is the sacred duty of the newspaper of record to repeat verbatim whatever 'law enforcement' reports. Only our hallowed Fourth Estate can so diligently transcribe words spoken by one person and put them onto our screens. Certainly such pronouncements from DC's finest should not be scrutinized for any resemblance to things like "facts" or "reality", which as well as being grossly dismissive to the lived experience of the PR flunky in question, might also result in the journalist having to do something more complicated than type out a quote.
Yes, of course law enforcement can lie or be mistaken. But I think that in the few hours or days after the event, when there are still many unknowns and investigations going on, it's understandable that a paper would simply publish what law enforcement said, as long as they make clear that is what they are doing. Then as more info comes out, they update their reporting to conform with the known facts.
The media is not in the facts business. It's in the narrative business. The narrative is that January 6th was an unprecedented, genuine, grave threat to the republic. Things that advance that narrative will be published amod great fanfare. Things are not are buried in paragraph 12 or sometimes not reported at all.
You know what you don't see? Anytime there is a police or CIA or FBI stenography piece in the media, you never see things like: "Our source stated, without evidence, that's officer Sicknick was hit in the head." You don't see the evidence caveat because it would be counter to the narrative.
That's also a fine principle to adhere too when reporting on the FBI infiltrating protest groups, the CIA infiltrating foreign governments, and the local police shooting dead a black motorist after a traffic stop.
Again, this was a brand new situation with many, many unknowns. While trying to figure out what's going on, law enforcement statements are part of that story. Yes of course they can lie, be mistaken, or spin things to make themselves look good. No one is disputing that.
As long as the paper (a) makes clear that they are merely repeating law enforcement statements without any other investigation, and (b) update their story once new facts come to light, (both of which the NYT did in this case) it's a reasonable thing to do when we are talking about an uncertain brand new situation with many unknowns.
The problem is that the original assertion gets a million impressions and the retraction gets 10,000. And how aggressively the retraction is publicized is very much now dependent on the political orientation of the outlet. Look at the Sicknick case, where it's been left to guys like Glenn Greenwald to get the torch out.
And what happens where a retraction isn't really feasible? Allegations of Russian interference on behalf of Trump were advanced by the CIA/FBI/etc. based on classified information. In other words there was no way for media outlets to independently corroborate. What we do get is a New Yorker article years later that examined the claims independently and found them wanting.
Your link doesn't support your contention. The line you put in quotation marks does not appear in the article. The only thing even close to it is "Some law-enforcement officials said shortly after the riot that they believed Mr. Sicknick had suffered blunt-force trauma from being struck in the head during the attack, based on reports from officers on the scene, but other officials have since disputed that account. Other officers were also hit with fire extinguishers and other objects."
So law enforcement, having lied about how Sicknick died, are now saying "other officers were also hit". It doesn't say where, it doesn't say how, it doesn't say by whom, and certainly there is no footage of it (much as they've yet to release footage of their killing of the young, unarmed woman who tried crawling through a door.) But sure, let's pretend that some obese mall cop being batted with 'other objects' was a grave threat to the Republic. I assume we'll be treating all such lawless incidents on federal property with the same solemnity.
Thank you for this. I hadn't seen it. I hope it can go without saying tgat I want any thug who did things like this to be brought to book. It should also be recognized, though, that any officer still crying about this months after the fact should probably find another job.
Also, the quote from the WSJ is indeed in the article. (When I bring it up, sometimes it's paywalled, and sometimes not; the quote appears after the paywall cutoff.) Here is the header and complete paragraph with that sentence:
"What did videos of the riot show about Mr. Sicknick?
"Investigators and journalists scoured thousands of videos posted on social media of the riot but didn’t initially see evidence of Mr. Sicknick being attacked. Other police officers were hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. A retired firefighter from Pennsylvania threw one at a police line on the lower west terrace and hit three officers, the FBI has alleged, citing video footage of the incident."
This is a terrible metric for judging others and, far worse, it seems grossly unfair that this isn't applied generally in any kind of principled way.
Every home burglary is _potentially_ a home invasion and rape, murder, torture, etc. – in the way you seem to be 'allowing' hypothetical considerations in this case. What if the occupants had been present when the burglar had entered the home?
If someone breaks into my house while chanting "Hang Judd" and they erected a gallows outside my house, it is reasonable to conclude that their intentions are more violent than simple property damage or burglary.
I'm guessing this is still an example of applying this "metric" to your political _enemies_. Do you also agree that it's reasonable to conclude that calls to 'abolish the police' or 'defund the police' are evidence that people want to be able to commit (violent) crimes and escape punishment?
I think it's more reasonable to believe that a large proportion of political speech is hyperbolic and that it's thus weak evidence of anything in particular.
Your guess is wrong. Violence is not political speech. Looting and smashing and burning of storefronts during BLM protests was violence, not political speech. Smashing the Capitol was violence, not political speech.
> ... someone breaks into my house while chanting "Hang Judd" and they erected a gallows outside my house
That's a (hypothetical) example of something your 'political _allies_' might do? I thought it was a kind of thinly veiled 'lynching' but now I'm less sure. Did you intend it to be just 'neutral'?
But the original comment to which I replied was implicitly claiming that the "Smashing the Capitol" _would_ have been more violent than it was, had the specific details of that event been different (e.g. "if they had found AOC in her hiding place"). But your reply mentioned additional (fictionally) 'factual' details, not _hypothetical_ details that _weren't_ 'factual'.
So chanting "Hang Judd" _is_ evident of violent intentions, and similarly so are whatever it is that some people might have said at The Capitol riot, even tho at least the latter seems to me like 'political speech', but some of the political speech of, e.g. BLM protestors, isn't evidence of any intention to commit violence?
I was and am arguing against judging anyone based on hypothetical 'Well, what if it had been worse?' considerations.
Freddie, I have to say, I love your longer reads, but this shows me that you're equally good at shorter reads, aka what we used to call "blog posts that just make a concise point and then end." I think it would be interesting to read more future thoughts that you have inspired by this, but this brief point is excellent.
Yes, well, I think after so many other previous media fiascoes borne of this excessive sort of partisanship, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for anyone in the chatting classes to "learn any lessons", slowly, or otherwise. I would love to be proven wrong on that, yet I doubt it.
The other aspect of this problem was the nearly uniform lockstep with which the major social media platforms went on the offense to start blocking content and even issuing bans to their users for even bringing it up, which essentially weaponized this partisan dogma.
This wholly partisan media class, coupled with the ability of platforms to enforce it as dogma on their users, is far more deleterious to society than almost anyone in the chattering classes is willing to admit. And it's not simply because this approach can, and ever will, get it wrong, but because it is endlessly laden with perverse incentive to simply go after the enemy du jour, whoever it is.
I went back to the original articles and they honestly seemed fine to me. Yeah, they missed an important distinction between the lab leak theory and the bioweapon theory, but I think that we were all freaking out a bit back in March.
The bigger problem, it seems to me, is the way that we took what should have been a decent starting point (the original articles) and somehow enshrined them as The Scientific Consensus (tm) instead of letting the news cycle develop further and naturally add more nuance.
To the extent that these can be separated (and maybe they can't), it seems to me more like a twitter problem than a media problem per se. And IMO the people who need to apologize aren't the people who wrote the first round of articles, but the people on twitter who shouted down anyone with a more nuanced take.
Those who dismissed lab leak as a racist conspiracy that had been "debunked" deserve to be dunked on. You can have epistemic humility about how COVID originated and still be scathing towards those who tried slamming the door shut on a perfectly viable theory.
(As an aside, I'd humbly request you do a post someday on the obnoxious overuse of the word "debunk," which has became internetese for "someone made an argument against it I personally found persuasive.")
"(As an aside, I'd humbly request you do a post someday on the obnoxious overuse of the word "debunk," which has became internetese for "someone made an argument against it I personally found persuasive.")"
This has been debunked. Four Pinocchios. Dangerous misinformation.
It's interesting to read some of these comments. Seems like a lot of people fixate on the culture war points even as Freddie tries to reframe them.
A lot of people in the comments encounter the possibility that international scientists working in Wuhan could be somewhat responsible for covid getting out there and they don't actually see a question of truth but a question of Trump or not Trump.
Folks, I just want to say, if you say "it's possible that maybe some scientists who happened to work in Wuhan accidentally leaked covid," I promise you, I promise you with all my heart, that the Cancellation Police will not descend on you and put you in jail for being Officially Trump.
"It's not impossible that maybe some scientists who happened to work in Wuhan may have accidentally leaked covid," is not a magic sentence that turns you into Trump. It's just not.
The problem is that there is zero evidence for a lab leak. Is it possible? Sure, it's possible. But to claim that it was a lab leak without evidence is dangerous and irresponsible. If you're going to make that claim, you better have evidence to back it up. So far no one who has made this claim has presented any evidence for it.
Define ‘evidence’ — because it’s quite obnoxious to suggest it is incumbent on the rest of us to provide evidence of something that was entirely in the hands of the CPC. The CPC, if you remember, were heavily invested in fake news and misinformation regarding the origins of Covid, they even blamed the poor Italians.
There probably are some people (particularly on the wingnut right) who claim that the virus definitely escaped from the lab, but in my experience, with regard to the sources I read, most people say no more than that the virus MIGHT have escaped from the lab, or that they personally believe it, though they know there is no proof. That is, for example, what Mike Pompeo said recently in an interview with Bari Weiss.
It's true that no evidence has been presented, but then again, the Chinese government won't allow a proper investigation, so what would you expect?
It's interesting how Freddie, and others, are making your point in the comment section. Essentially the point is "The lab leak theory has been studied and results are inconclusive."
But people in this comments section seem to be saying that if you dismiss it based on lack of evidence rather than pre-dismiss it based on racism, you're doing it wrong.
I disagree. I think pre-dismissing it based on racism is a fine bias to have (I kind of have that bias myself, every time I read about the theory, I think some parts seem possible but I keep having a knee-jerk reaction of "this thing smells of racism so I'm already hyper-skeptical.") But it's exactly that - just one of the many biases out there.
The lab leak theory having sketchy evidence does confirm my bias that the theory is racist. But I really don't like how hardcore people are being about "it can't possibly even be a valid thought to have because it's racist."
As I've said before, if you entertain the theory before dismissing it, nobody's going to arrest you for being insufficiently anti-racist. I promise.
"The lab leak theory having sketchy evidence does confirm my bias that the theory is racist. But I really don't like how hardcore people are being about "it can't possibly even be a valid thought to have because it's racist.""
NYT journalist on the Covid beat said precisely this on Tuesday. Our best and brightest, folks!
The religion of the chattering classes of this country is equity, and racism its prime belief. If a society incentivizes anti-racism as its most prized ritual, we can't be surprised when society's elites start to actually believe in it.
The more I think about it, partially due to my bias in favor of what I consider sincere anti-racism, I don't even consider it to be a case of them believing in it.
I think that the liberal media are addicted to feeling like good and non-guilty people, and they are addicted to the instant gratification of it, and they don't want to do any real work, and anti-racism, to them, just seems like the cheapest and easiest way to do that.
I think it's also of course a networking tool... a way to separate the less-experienced and less conformist people from the people who you can predict more easily as a coworker. I guess Freddie talks a lot about that as well.
Oh for sure, there's a real in-group thing about it. (I've seen it tied to the theory of elite overproduction, too.) But I think a lot of them buy into it genuinely as well.
Let's not restrict this to the Chinese government. The corporate media was more than happy to take them at their word. Let's not act as if there's a horde of devoted muckrakers pounding at the door in Wuhan asking to investigate. The media doesn't care. They don't employ anyone smart enough to understand it even if they did.
At this point NO theory has real evidence. The best we can do is assemble circumstantial evidence for all of the theories. What's the alternative, completely ignore the origins of a virus that has sickened and killed millions?
The possibility of a lab leak was dismissed because there was no evidence for it. There still isn't. To claim that it was a lab leak without any evidence for that is dangerous and irresponsible.
"And now, though they may have pulled back from those specific claims, kicking and screaming, they will not relent on their general stance that this was an organized coup attempt that came close to succeeding."
When someone tells you who they are, you believe them. They were chanting "hang Mike Pence." They erected a gallows outside the building. It seems obvious to me that their intent was not peaceful. Mike Pence, probably Trump biggest bootlicker, whose crime here was that he was planning to accurately count electoral votes.
No, they had no chance of actually overthrowing the US federal government. But this was still some serious shit. Obviously there are no control groups in history, so we'll never know for sure, but it seems obvious to me that with only a little better planning on their side or a little worse luck, there could have been far more deaths.
"The possibility of a lab leak was dismissed because there was no evidence for it. There still isn't. To claim that it was a lab leak without any evidence for that is dangerous and irresponsible."
There's also extremely limited evidence for the wet market theory, but it was pronounced by the corporate media as the Truth. It's got nothing to do with evidence and 100% to do with narrative. Remember, most journalists are - generously - 105 IQ, can't read a scientific paper, and wouldn't have the time to do it even if they were able. They're under deadline and have ten other pieces of clickbait due in the next hour. So when analytics show "where did COVID come from" needs a story, and there is the prime directive of Orange Man Bad, anything that would give Trump's anti-China stance the slightest credence would be prima facie Debunked. And thus it was a dangerous racist hoax. Until Trump was gone, at which point it wasn't.
As I understand it, there's _no_ evidence for the wet market theory. It's assumed, because that's typically the sort of place that these weird crossovers happen, and because the known genealogies of covid19 show the "parent" strains as occurring nowhere near each other, meaning the animals would've had to have been far out of their range.
The lab leak theory has always been worthy of further investigation for the simple astounding coincidence that a hitherto unknown virus appeared in Wuhan, home of a one of the few BSL4 labs in China, over a thousand kilometers away from where its closest naturally occurring related virus was found. Instead of pursuing this angle, the media simply accepted the word of a group of epidemiologists led by one of the two people in the world most responsible if there was a leak, without considering for a moment that epidemiologists are just as likely to close ranks around one of their colleagues as police are around a fellow cop accused of brutality. Then, at the start of a virus pandemic the likes of which the Wuhan lab was supposedly set up precisely to prevent and combat, the Chinese government shut down the lab and made all its research data unavailable. Why would they do that?
These facts alone warranted intense investigation into the origins of the virus, especially by the newly enlightened "science followers" who, presumably, would have liked to know where the virus came from and how another similar outbreak might be prevented.
Instead, the media bluecheck stenographers displayed a breathtaking lack of curiosity about where this new virus actually came from, especially considering their noisily expressed embrace of "science."
The national media and their friends at Big Tech deserve all the crow they will eat now (assuming any of them can be embarrassed, which I doubt).
But, if you think about it, once the totally insane practice of demonizing the always entirely reasonable lab leak theory as a "racist conspiracy theory" burned itself out (which was inevitable, due to the lab leak theory being quite strong on the merits) -- once the burning-out happened, how *else* was the culture going to self-correct other than by going through a period of "dunkage", i.e. overendorsing the lab leak theory and under-endorsing the "zoonosis not in a lab" theory? Seriously, I can't imagine any other way our culture has of doing this: "dunking" is precisely the sociological ritual we have at our disposal. We have no other way of adjusting the rudder.
At any rate, the real issue was the incredible degree of censorship and demonization of a reasonable and important scientific hypothesis which deserved to be aired. A discursive "overcorrection" may be happening now, sure -- but note that, to this day, nobody is censoring or demonizing the "zoonosis not in a lab" theory. So, the overcorrection doesn't seem to be *too* bad, really. The media did a horrible job with this one (FB's censorship policies being the worst offender), and since dunking on them is the one price for them that exists in our culture, I say bring on the posterization Olympics.
The gloating and dunking is valid and worthwhile. Millions of innocent people died and the media were complicit in a lot of it — mask, no mask, shaming, scolding, this and that.
The lab leak (if it happened, and it likely did) and how the WHO was complicit in covering it up (AND HOW THE US NIH AND DR FAUCI WERE ACTUALLY FUNDING THE G-o-F RESEARCH!!) contributes to the further erosion of the fifth estate and trust in public authorities. This is demonic and bad. Dunks must be had for the good of humanity.
And yes the US and PRC both must pay, and neither will.
Far be it from me to discourage shaming fraudsters, but I honestly don't know what difference acceptance of the lab leak theory would have made to saving lives. Unless you mean the millions of lives lost is linked to the shaming and scolding and not to denying the lab leak theory?
the context is that millions died, no matter what these people (and the rest of us) need justice and the pursuit of the truth as to what caused this.
Further, the way the media treated the pandemic further caused confusion, distrust, and mistrust— surely lead to deaths itself.
Anyone who still listens to "public health experts" after their shocking display last summer is insane.
Honestly, aside from their hamfisted initial response, I don't know how the Chinese are really responsible. This was an American project that was moved to China only when gain of function research was outlawed in the US.
I hold the Chinese more culpable for refusing access to the lab records that would resolve all this.
Not enforcing and abiding infection protocols and then covering it up and blaming italian frozen fish is 100% the responsibility of the PRC.
I hope someone can explain *why* the lab leak theory was so forcefully opposed and mocked. I get Freddie linking that posture to a pro-Democrat bias. What I don't get is what the Democrats had to gain from denying the lab-leak theory.
What the Democrats had to gain is that Trump brought it up, and if Donald Trump said the sky was blue, we'd have every pundit in the WaPo and NYT telling us it's not.
It was an all out messaging war on Trump, whether he was right about X or wrong about X. It didn't matter.
But that's so petty. How is it worth torpedoing your credibility over such an inconsequential detail?
yeah I don't get how NYT/Vox/WaPo work either, it doesn't seem rational to me
They didn't realize, and probably still don't, that their credibility is threatened by their poor reporting. These reporters mostly don't understand science very well, and they despise Trump (understandably), so if Trump says one thing and one or two scientists say the opposite, that will get reported as a "scientific consensus" that what Trump said is wrong. The whole topic from then on will be viewed through an exclusively political lens -- anyone who suggests that Trump may have been right is assumed to be a partisan right-winger.
"reporters mostly don't understand science very well" - 25 years ago in college my fellow science majors and I would gather round the Science Times section every week and point and laugh at the mistakes both of fact and of interpretation. You have absolutely no idea how incredibly, laughably stupid reporters are, and it's not just limited to science.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Molecular Biology knows that manipulation of DNA & RNA leaves traces, which don't seem to be there in SARS2. So there's no evidence that this was engineered or weaponized. But it could be BOTH zoonotic AND escaped from a lab if someone got sloppy.
It's the conflation of "lab leak" with "engineered bioweapon" that was the wrong call, but then that's exactly what you would expect from ignorant and arrogant Ivy League Poli-Sci majors attempting to write about something more complicated than DC committee assignments.
Your analysis makes a lot of sense. It's a combination of ignorance and hubris. Corporate journalism selects for - and apologies for the crudeness here but it's the perfect descriptor - fart-sniffers. They're serious about credentials and prestige but they couldn't think their way out of a one-way street. They're deferential to personages and titles but can't detect virtue or malice when it's across the room from them. They're committed to science but couldn't read anything longer than an abstract. And above all, they care deeply about other journalists but couldn't pick a viewer or a reader out of a one-man lineup.
yeah, it's status seeking a la Veblen. My brother works on the marketing side at the times, and he's turned into one of the Pod People. He actually once said "Maggie Haberman has always been polite and pleasant to me" after one of my rants (as if that's even relevant to anything?).
Examples like that always fascinate me because it's not just the irrelevance but... what kind of mental model of the world is that? That if someone is a Good person, they do Good things, like be polite to marketers. If someone is a Bad person, they do Bad things, like kick puppies and tip badly. So if a Bad person does something Good this is cause for confusion or re-examination. I can't imagine going through life like that. It must be very, very confusing. Like if he's at a country club and some cartoonish ogre of a plutocrat holds open a door for him or buys him a drink, he's thinking "but gosh, I thought he was Bad!"
Matt Taibbi is pretty good at illustrating the incentives behind sacrificing credibility for keeping your audience hooked in the book "Hate Inc."
Taibbi is a guy who these days often does the things he calls out others for in the book, so if you care about hypocrisy it might not be for you.
To me, the book is good, easy to read, and it holds up as an analysis.
In "Hate, Inc." Taibbi confesses to the role he played (in the past now, so he says, and so far, he seems to have meant it) in getting to this dismal status quo in the press.
I'll confess, I don't have super negative feelings about him but I presumed many people in this comments section do, due to them being progressive and online.
Basically, I remember reading the book, and following Taibbi's current reporting at the same time. It was funny because in the book you had him talking about hysterias, using the example of the English media hysteria around mods versus rockers battles. (One of my favorite parts of the book). And online, you had Taibbi exaggerating about leftist vandals attacking statues based on perhaps two stories.
I didn't get mad at him or want to cancel him as much as I thought "Ahh I see what you're doing here Matt..."
Because it was originally floated by Trump I believe
Actually the Slow Boring/Yglesias piece Freddie linked details it the best. It seemed to be more an attack on Senator Cotton.
It was both. Once Trump mentioned it, it was full blown "disinformation/conspiracy theory" moral panic time in the chattering classes.
Those with dirty hands worked double-time to diffuse any criticism. Follow the threads — Sagaar Enteji has a clip about it, it’s not hidden.
Because entertaining it might have encouraged the loose-cannon psychopath Trump to do something like start a war with China.
There is some indication Fauci and other key deniers are connected to "gain of function" research (where scientists modify viruses to make them more deadly/infectious/what-have-you in order to understand them better). If so, it could potentially be embarrassing for them, I guess?
IDK, that's what some (I think Greenwald was one?) have hypothesized, but I haven't seen anyone really dig into it. I hope someone does.
"...if you only paid attention to all of the dunking going on you would be under the impression that we know for a fact that the virus emerged from a lab."
Well, it depends on one's reading comprehension skills. And maybe on what sources one chooses to read. I read Matt Yglesias's piece, and I've seen a few others, and all of them emphasize that we don't know if the virus came from the lab or not. The issues at this point are (1) certain elements of the left-leaning side of the media chose, either out of sloppiness or ineptitude, to discount the possibility of a lab origin, and (2) the Chinese government has not allowed a proper independent investigation. Both of these are worth noting. In connection with (1), it is particularly disturbing that the NYT's COVID report has been quoted as saying that we shouldn't talk about the possibility of a lab leak because the idea is racist -- an utterly idiotic statement.
I believe it went beyond discounting the possibility, to labeling the mention of it a conspiracy theory. Even words like "debunked" were thrown around.
Well, that is discounting it, just in a very aggressive and hostile sort of way. You're right, though, that they were clearly trying to shut down any discussion of the topic.
I don't understand why the media initially dismissing claims that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab is an example of pro-Democrat bias rather than not wanting to side with knee-jerk racism.
The fact you consider it knee-jerk racism is precisely the problem you liberals have.
“You liberals” nice.
I work around a lot of people who talked about the “China virus” before we were all sent home. Maybe I could give them the benefit of the doubt that they were intellectually curious & were positing a notion for how the virus originated. I won’t though, because that is a garbage take.
It must be because they're irredeemable, evil racists, much like those who call it the Ebola virus or West Nile.
. . . or MERS or Spanish Flu . . .
Racists, all of them!
This is silly. There is an obvious attempt at being derogatory when using a term like “wuhan flu.” Casual racism is a thing.
You are surely projecting. Calling something "Wuhan Flu" is no more racist than, for example, referring to a disease that originated in Berlin "Berlin Flu" or a disease that originated in Strasbourg "Strasbourg Flu."
It's not surprising that racist people see racism everywhere. For the rest of us, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I, for one, would love to hear an explanation of why "China virus" or "Wuhan flu" are derogatory that doesn't apply equally well to "Ebola virus", "West Nile virus", "Lyme disease", "Middle East Respiratory Syndrome", "Spanish flu", and countless other terms based on the places where those diseases were first identified.
Is it racist to call someone a China-man if he is actually from China?
Is "Englishman" or "Scotsman" racist?
Is he actually from Scotland? Because no *true* "Scotsman" is racist.
Etymology, my man. “Englishman” does not have a history of being used as a pejorative.
Yeah you’re precisely the liberals I’m referring to
Enough interest in your trad-man blog to do a podcast yet?
TradNorm isn’t Trad and I’m on sabbatical — stay tuned Eric!
Yes!
How is "Chinese people unleashed covid19 because they made a mistake while doing high-level virology research" more racist than "Chinese people unleashed covid19 because they butcher their meat in unsanitary conditions"?
I just straight up do not understand how the lab leak hypothesis is racist.
1) I would hesitate to blame “Chinese people” for the same reason I’m loath to blame “American people” for atrocities in Iraq. Technically correct? Absolutely. But it’s uncool to blame regular people for state actions.
2) That said, if today someone said “China accidentally unleashed Covid.” OK. Fair point. To call it a year ago was much less about thoughtful speculation than an opportunity to shit on a country where people are different than here. Some people here disagree with that because it’s easy to blame those lame ol’ democrats.
I mean, in both cases, it would be mistakes made by individual Chinese people, not the state itself acting, but I take your point.
Let me put it this way: "Covid happened because Chinese people eat weird, gross, unsanitary wild animals that they butcher in horrific fashion! Watch this video of them doing it!" is a social media post I saw multiple times in the early months of the pandemic. Despite the popularity of Asian cuisine in the US, "The Chinese eat gross things and hack up rats to put in their stew" or whatever is an existing stereotype of the Chinese that persists to this day.
"Covid happened because Chinese people are careless!" isn't...really a stereotype of Chinese people? At least not one I've come across. I've encountered stereotypes of plenty of other ethnic groups being incompetent/dumb/careless/lazy/what-have-you, but stereotypes about Chinese people are generally that they're ruthless and uncreative. I mean, I guess the bioweapon hypothesis (which does indeed seem to be pure conspiracy) could fit into that stereotype, but I don't see how the lab leak does.
I see your point & it’s reasonable. My response would be that I get someone saying “I suspect the virus leaked out of a Chinese lab.” I don’t think those ranting about the “Wuhan flu” a year ago was speaking from good faith though. It sounded a lot more like xenophobia to me. Hence why I think DeBoer’s contention that it was the media covering for democrats doesn’t ring true to me.
This seems like (yet another) instance of the tension between 'decoupling' and 'contextualizing'.
One interpretation of "Wuhan flu" is that it describes a virus that originated in Wuhan – this is decoupling. The 'contextualizing' interpretation is that "Wuhan flu" is xenophobia.
And _both_ interpretations could be true (and probably are)! But it's often very difficult to even _notice_ that both interpretations are possible and the 'contextualizing' interpretation seems to me to be the dominant mode (e.g. in 'the media'), which impedes discussing facts and theories/hypotheses that are even _possibly_ interpreted as 'bad' in the contextualizing mode. That's a real, and tragic, loss.
Though this was much, much smaller than the Capitol Riot or the lab leak story, I feel like the Jussie Smollett incident was a canary in the coal mine for this stuff.
That dude's story was ridiculous from Day 1. It made no sense, and everyone knew it. Yet so many politics-obsessed liberals practically wanted it to be true because it fed their outlook about the world.
Things suck right now. We have liberal media, whose job it is to protect the Democrats. And we have right-wing media, whose job it is to protect the Republicans. Principles and humility are gone.
Having partisan journalism isn't necessarily a problem if everyone knows the rules of the game. It also wouldn't be a problem if - as in the golden age of yellow journalism - there was still diversity of voice, with several papers in any city and often with different owners. Regional voices also still had primacy. Now there is no diversity of voice, ownership is hyper-concentrated, the news is the same from Key West to Kauai, and there is still the slightest veneer of prestige and balance. Granted the media has been doing its absolute best over the past six years to surrender what's left of their cachet, but tens of millions of people still think "well if this big shiny newspaper said it, I'm sure it's being reported in good faith and is based on something other than stenography."
If everyone knew where they stood and that the media was in the business of selling narratives, we'd be significantly better off than now. We have the worst of both worlds. A rotten, partisan system with a skinsuit of respectability.
>"the January 6th rioters were a bunch of idiot deadenders who, while deserving of the arrests and censure they have received, could not have taken control of a Chucky Cheese, let alone the US government."
True as far as it goes, but if they had found AOC in her hiding place, would they have harmed her? Assassinated her?
How about Nancy Pelosi? How about Mike Pence?
Are you really so sure that they would have just said "oh never mind" and walked away?
You are correct that Officer Sicknick's head was not bashed in, but he did collapse that night after being pepper sprayed, and died the next day. And, per the Wall Street Journal's recent review, "Other police officers were hit in the head with a fire extinguisher." https://www.wsj.com/articles/officer-brian-sicknick-what-we-know-about-his-death-11619010119
I concur that it's hard to know how to characterize January 6th which is why I would really like to see some kind of comprehensive account -- if not a commission then a Lawrence Wright book or longform piece in the New Yorker. It's crazy to me that people actually died for Trump's vanity and ego and I can imagine that it was pretty scary on that day in the Capitol such that ongoing anger and PTSD is warranted for the people who were doing their jobs. But I cannot watch CNN or MSNBC anymore (which is a good thing because they were always terrible but the Trump car crash was so hard to look away from) and when they harp on January 6th I feel it is embarrassing to the left or the Democratic party. And I do wonder if they had come across Mitt Romney if he had not been redirected what they might have done. Violence seems less likely than the kind of yelling that he was getting before and after the event, but the fact that people were armed and the mob sentiment was flying makes me wonder. If the insurrection had been from the left -- say a BLM or antifa led effort to shut down the Capitol for voting for something perceived to be racist (say national voter ID requirements) and a white Capitol police officer had shot a Black woman with a military service history under the same basic conditions that happened on the 6th I wonder what the media's reaction would have been? I am not saying that I think that the shot was unjustified by the protesters behavior, and I am pretty sure based on how I have viewed many of these police shootings under heightened conditions that I would not have felt in a position to judge the police officer, but I do think that the media coverage on CNN and MSNBC would not have been the same and I think that is not a great sign.
You're not going to get a comprehensive account because the Capitol Police are under no obligation to release the tens of thousands of hours of footage that they have, so they won't do it.
A Congressional subpoena would get all the video. Of course Republicans are trying to a Congressional investigation.
A Congressional subpoena would get all the video that is known to exist, recoverable, and not redacted for reasons of national security. In other words, it would get exactly what the police want it to, and no more. This is exactly why so many jurisdictions now many bodycam footage a matter of public record. That should be the default.
edit: "trying to block"
Precisely. I'm not sure why deBoer and Greenwald are so focused on the Sicknick story as somehow explosive proof of how evil the media is. Law enforcement first reported that he had died from the fire extinguisher, so that's what the NY Times reported. Then when that changed and it became clear that he actually died of a stroke after being pepper sprayed by a rioter, they updated their story. What is so evil about how this was reported?
I answered that question very simply and specifically: on January 8th, ProPublica reported that Sicknick's family had received a phone call from him THE NIGHT AFTER THE RIOT. Meaning that he could not possibly have had his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher. Yet members of the media reported that as fact for weeks afterwards. I'd say that's a major failing.
Also, there is literally no evidence that he was pepper sprayed himself, and no evidence that if he was he died from that. The medical examiner was quite clear in that regard.
The videos clearly show him getting pepper sprayed, then bending over to wash it out of his eyes. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/24/us/officer-sicknick-capitol-riot.html
Not to exonerate the thug with the bear spray (I've seen it called 'bear spray' - I'm not sure of the difference between that and the pepper spray) but what the video shows is some guy spraying a can with Sicknick in the vicinity, and then a separate video shows the well-fed officer of the law wandering around and rinsing his eyes. Would he be pouring water in his eyes were he not sprayed? We can be charitable and say he wasn't doing it for the cameras. It's almost unthinkable that he'd take such an action unless he had had his eyes irritated somehow. And the bear spray would certainly be the most likely culprit for that based on the tiny amount of footage that the Capitol Police have deigned to make available. (They have tens of thousands of hours of footage that none of us will ever see.)
But it's also fair to say that if he was sprayed, it was pretty damn light, and "he actually died of a stroke after being pepper sprayed by a rioter" is a hugely misleading way of framing it. If a light mist of irritant in the eyes led to strokes, police and rioter mortality would look a lot different. The framing is that one led to the other, that it's a direct causal relationship. (In fact the only directly attributable death that day came when an unarmed woman was shot in the neck by an unknown party as she tried to crawl through a door, but everyone - Donald Trump most of all - has forgotten about that one.)
Federal prosecutors wrote in court filings that the guy who did the spraying had both pepper spray and bear spray on his belt, but no one knows which of those he used when he sprayed Sicknick. Bear spray is the same thing as pepper spray, but more concentrated and not meant to be used on humans.
Nothing I said was incorrect or misleading. He was pepper sprayed and then had a stroke the next day. Obviously I'm not a doctor and I can't say whether this was correlation or causation. Of course it's possible that he was sprayed, washed out the spray, was just fine, and then just happened to have a stroke the next day. WaPo quoted the medical examiner saying "all that transpired played a role in his condition." So who knows.
It is misleading. If I said "I bought a lotto ticket - next thing you know I'm driving a Labmo" it's obvious what I'm implying. If it turns out I actually stole the car, I've poisoned the well.
I'm sure many other things also played a role in his condition, that's the point. To eliminate things like lifestyle, history on a stressful job and so on is a rhetorical attempt to make a complex situation more linear than it is.
Also thank you for explaining the spray difference.
"Law enforcement first reported that he had died from the fire extinguisher, so that's what the NY Times reported."
Of course it is the sacred duty of the newspaper of record to repeat verbatim whatever 'law enforcement' reports. Only our hallowed Fourth Estate can so diligently transcribe words spoken by one person and put them onto our screens. Certainly such pronouncements from DC's finest should not be scrutinized for any resemblance to things like "facts" or "reality", which as well as being grossly dismissive to the lived experience of the PR flunky in question, might also result in the journalist having to do something more complicated than type out a quote.
You people get the media you deserve.
Yes, of course law enforcement can lie or be mistaken. But I think that in the few hours or days after the event, when there are still many unknowns and investigations going on, it's understandable that a paper would simply publish what law enforcement said, as long as they make clear that is what they are doing. Then as more info comes out, they update their reporting to conform with the known facts.
Hmmm I see!
If that's supposed to be some sort of clever sarcasm, I for one don't get it.
The media is not in the facts business. It's in the narrative business. The narrative is that January 6th was an unprecedented, genuine, grave threat to the republic. Things that advance that narrative will be published amod great fanfare. Things are not are buried in paragraph 12 or sometimes not reported at all.
You know what you don't see? Anytime there is a police or CIA or FBI stenography piece in the media, you never see things like: "Our source stated, without evidence, that's officer Sicknick was hit in the head." You don't see the evidence caveat because it would be counter to the narrative.
That's also a fine principle to adhere too when reporting on the FBI infiltrating protest groups, the CIA infiltrating foreign governments, and the local police shooting dead a black motorist after a traffic stop.
Again, this was a brand new situation with many, many unknowns. While trying to figure out what's going on, law enforcement statements are part of that story. Yes of course they can lie, be mistaken, or spin things to make themselves look good. No one is disputing that.
As long as the paper (a) makes clear that they are merely repeating law enforcement statements without any other investigation, and (b) update their story once new facts come to light, (both of which the NYT did in this case) it's a reasonable thing to do when we are talking about an uncertain brand new situation with many unknowns.
The problem is that the original assertion gets a million impressions and the retraction gets 10,000. And how aggressively the retraction is publicized is very much now dependent on the political orientation of the outlet. Look at the Sicknick case, where it's been left to guys like Glenn Greenwald to get the torch out.
And what happens where a retraction isn't really feasible? Allegations of Russian interference on behalf of Trump were advanced by the CIA/FBI/etc. based on classified information. In other words there was no way for media outlets to independently corroborate. What we do get is a New Yorker article years later that examined the claims independently and found them wanting.
Your link doesn't support your contention. The line you put in quotation marks does not appear in the article. The only thing even close to it is "Some law-enforcement officials said shortly after the riot that they believed Mr. Sicknick had suffered blunt-force trauma from being struck in the head during the attack, based on reports from officers on the scene, but other officials have since disputed that account. Other officers were also hit with fire extinguishers and other objects."
So law enforcement, having lied about how Sicknick died, are now saying "other officers were also hit". It doesn't say where, it doesn't say how, it doesn't say by whom, and certainly there is no footage of it (much as they've yet to release footage of their killing of the young, unarmed woman who tried crawling through a door.) But sure, let's pretend that some obese mall cop being batted with 'other objects' was a grave threat to the Republic. I assume we'll be treating all such lawless incidents on federal property with the same solemnity.
There is footage of it. Here it is:
https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/2021/01/11/capitol-riots-fire-extinguisher-thrown-police-officer/6629347002/
Thank you for this. I hadn't seen it. I hope it can go without saying tgat I want any thug who did things like this to be brought to book. It should also be recognized, though, that any officer still crying about this months after the fact should probably find another job.
Also, the quote from the WSJ is indeed in the article. (When I bring it up, sometimes it's paywalled, and sometimes not; the quote appears after the paywall cutoff.) Here is the header and complete paragraph with that sentence:
"What did videos of the riot show about Mr. Sicknick?
"Investigators and journalists scoured thousands of videos posted on social media of the riot but didn’t initially see evidence of Mr. Sicknick being attacked. Other police officers were hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. A retired firefighter from Pennsylvania threw one at a police line on the lower west terrace and hit three officers, the FBI has alleged, citing video footage of the incident."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/officer-brian-sicknick-what-we-know-about-his-death-11619010119
Thank you. I wasn't logged in. I'm logged in now.
This is a terrible metric for judging others and, far worse, it seems grossly unfair that this isn't applied generally in any kind of principled way.
Every home burglary is _potentially_ a home invasion and rape, murder, torture, etc. – in the way you seem to be 'allowing' hypothetical considerations in this case. What if the occupants had been present when the burglar had entered the home?
If someone breaks into my house while chanting "Hang Judd" and they erected a gallows outside my house, it is reasonable to conclude that their intentions are more violent than simple property damage or burglary.
I'm guessing this is still an example of applying this "metric" to your political _enemies_. Do you also agree that it's reasonable to conclude that calls to 'abolish the police' or 'defund the police' are evidence that people want to be able to commit (violent) crimes and escape punishment?
I think it's more reasonable to believe that a large proportion of political speech is hyperbolic and that it's thus weak evidence of anything in particular.
Your guess is wrong. Violence is not political speech. Looting and smashing and burning of storefronts during BLM protests was violence, not political speech. Smashing the Capitol was violence, not political speech.
You wrote:
> ... someone breaks into my house while chanting "Hang Judd" and they erected a gallows outside my house
That's a (hypothetical) example of something your 'political _allies_' might do? I thought it was a kind of thinly veiled 'lynching' but now I'm less sure. Did you intend it to be just 'neutral'?
But the original comment to which I replied was implicitly claiming that the "Smashing the Capitol" _would_ have been more violent than it was, had the specific details of that event been different (e.g. "if they had found AOC in her hiding place"). But your reply mentioned additional (fictionally) 'factual' details, not _hypothetical_ details that _weren't_ 'factual'.
So chanting "Hang Judd" _is_ evident of violent intentions, and similarly so are whatever it is that some people might have said at The Capitol riot, even tho at least the latter seems to me like 'political speech', but some of the political speech of, e.g. BLM protestors, isn't evidence of any intention to commit violence?
I was and am arguing against judging anyone based on hypothetical 'Well, what if it had been worse?' considerations.
Freddie, I have to say, I love your longer reads, but this shows me that you're equally good at shorter reads, aka what we used to call "blog posts that just make a concise point and then end." I think it would be interesting to read more future thoughts that you have inspired by this, but this brief point is excellent.
Yes, well, I think after so many other previous media fiascoes borne of this excessive sort of partisanship, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for anyone in the chatting classes to "learn any lessons", slowly, or otherwise. I would love to be proven wrong on that, yet I doubt it.
The other aspect of this problem was the nearly uniform lockstep with which the major social media platforms went on the offense to start blocking content and even issuing bans to their users for even bringing it up, which essentially weaponized this partisan dogma.
This wholly partisan media class, coupled with the ability of platforms to enforce it as dogma on their users, is far more deleterious to society than almost anyone in the chattering classes is willing to admit. And it's not simply because this approach can, and ever will, get it wrong, but because it is endlessly laden with perverse incentive to simply go after the enemy du jour, whoever it is.
I went back to the original articles and they honestly seemed fine to me. Yeah, they missed an important distinction between the lab leak theory and the bioweapon theory, but I think that we were all freaking out a bit back in March.
The bigger problem, it seems to me, is the way that we took what should have been a decent starting point (the original articles) and somehow enshrined them as The Scientific Consensus (tm) instead of letting the news cycle develop further and naturally add more nuance.
To the extent that these can be separated (and maybe they can't), it seems to me more like a twitter problem than a media problem per se. And IMO the people who need to apologize aren't the people who wrote the first round of articles, but the people on twitter who shouted down anyone with a more nuanced take.
Those who dismissed lab leak as a racist conspiracy that had been "debunked" deserve to be dunked on. You can have epistemic humility about how COVID originated and still be scathing towards those who tried slamming the door shut on a perfectly viable theory.
(As an aside, I'd humbly request you do a post someday on the obnoxious overuse of the word "debunk," which has became internetese for "someone made an argument against it I personally found persuasive.")
You're being generous with the "someone made an argument" component, when "I heard someone mention it was debunked" suffices in the interwebs.
"(As an aside, I'd humbly request you do a post someday on the obnoxious overuse of the word "debunk," which has became internetese for "someone made an argument against it I personally found persuasive.")"
This has been debunked. Four Pinocchios. Dangerous misinformation.
It's interesting to read some of these comments. Seems like a lot of people fixate on the culture war points even as Freddie tries to reframe them.
A lot of people in the comments encounter the possibility that international scientists working in Wuhan could be somewhat responsible for covid getting out there and they don't actually see a question of truth but a question of Trump or not Trump.
Folks, I just want to say, if you say "it's possible that maybe some scientists who happened to work in Wuhan accidentally leaked covid," I promise you, I promise you with all my heart, that the Cancellation Police will not descend on you and put you in jail for being Officially Trump.
"It's not impossible that maybe some scientists who happened to work in Wuhan may have accidentally leaked covid," is not a magic sentence that turns you into Trump. It's just not.
The problem is that there is zero evidence for a lab leak. Is it possible? Sure, it's possible. But to claim that it was a lab leak without evidence is dangerous and irresponsible. If you're going to make that claim, you better have evidence to back it up. So far no one who has made this claim has presented any evidence for it.
Define ‘evidence’ — because it’s quite obnoxious to suggest it is incumbent on the rest of us to provide evidence of something that was entirely in the hands of the CPC. The CPC, if you remember, were heavily invested in fake news and misinformation regarding the origins of Covid, they even blamed the poor Italians.
There probably are some people (particularly on the wingnut right) who claim that the virus definitely escaped from the lab, but in my experience, with regard to the sources I read, most people say no more than that the virus MIGHT have escaped from the lab, or that they personally believe it, though they know there is no proof. That is, for example, what Mike Pompeo said recently in an interview with Bari Weiss.
It's true that no evidence has been presented, but then again, the Chinese government won't allow a proper investigation, so what would you expect?
It's interesting how Freddie, and others, are making your point in the comment section. Essentially the point is "The lab leak theory has been studied and results are inconclusive."
But people in this comments section seem to be saying that if you dismiss it based on lack of evidence rather than pre-dismiss it based on racism, you're doing it wrong.
I disagree. I think pre-dismissing it based on racism is a fine bias to have (I kind of have that bias myself, every time I read about the theory, I think some parts seem possible but I keep having a knee-jerk reaction of "this thing smells of racism so I'm already hyper-skeptical.") But it's exactly that - just one of the many biases out there.
The lab leak theory having sketchy evidence does confirm my bias that the theory is racist. But I really don't like how hardcore people are being about "it can't possibly even be a valid thought to have because it's racist."
As I've said before, if you entertain the theory before dismissing it, nobody's going to arrest you for being insufficiently anti-racist. I promise.
"The lab leak theory having sketchy evidence does confirm my bias that the theory is racist. But I really don't like how hardcore people are being about "it can't possibly even be a valid thought to have because it's racist.""
NYT journalist on the Covid beat said precisely this on Tuesday. Our best and brightest, folks!
The religion of the chattering classes of this country is equity, and racism its prime belief. If a society incentivizes anti-racism as its most prized ritual, we can't be surprised when society's elites start to actually believe in it.
The more I think about it, partially due to my bias in favor of what I consider sincere anti-racism, I don't even consider it to be a case of them believing in it.
I think that the liberal media are addicted to feeling like good and non-guilty people, and they are addicted to the instant gratification of it, and they don't want to do any real work, and anti-racism, to them, just seems like the cheapest and easiest way to do that.
I think it's also of course a networking tool... a way to separate the less-experienced and less conformist people from the people who you can predict more easily as a coworker. I guess Freddie talks a lot about that as well.
Oh for sure, there's a real in-group thing about it. (I've seen it tied to the theory of elite overproduction, too.) But I think a lot of them buy into it genuinely as well.
Yeah, fair enough.
Let's not restrict this to the Chinese government. The corporate media was more than happy to take them at their word. Let's not act as if there's a horde of devoted muckrakers pounding at the door in Wuhan asking to investigate. The media doesn't care. They don't employ anyone smart enough to understand it even if they did.
At this point NO theory has real evidence. The best we can do is assemble circumstantial evidence for all of the theories. What's the alternative, completely ignore the origins of a virus that has sickened and killed millions?
A minor nitpick: it's "Chuck E. Cheese".
(The E stands for Entertainment. I am not making this up.)
The possibility of a lab leak was dismissed because there was no evidence for it. There still isn't. To claim that it was a lab leak without any evidence for that is dangerous and irresponsible.
"And now, though they may have pulled back from those specific claims, kicking and screaming, they will not relent on their general stance that this was an organized coup attempt that came close to succeeding."
When someone tells you who they are, you believe them. They were chanting "hang Mike Pence." They erected a gallows outside the building. It seems obvious to me that their intent was not peaceful. Mike Pence, probably Trump biggest bootlicker, whose crime here was that he was planning to accurately count electoral votes.
No, they had no chance of actually overthrowing the US federal government. But this was still some serious shit. Obviously there are no control groups in history, so we'll never know for sure, but it seems obvious to me that with only a little better planning on their side or a little worse luck, there could have been far more deaths.
"The possibility of a lab leak was dismissed because there was no evidence for it. There still isn't. To claim that it was a lab leak without any evidence for that is dangerous and irresponsible."
There's also extremely limited evidence for the wet market theory, but it was pronounced by the corporate media as the Truth. It's got nothing to do with evidence and 100% to do with narrative. Remember, most journalists are - generously - 105 IQ, can't read a scientific paper, and wouldn't have the time to do it even if they were able. They're under deadline and have ten other pieces of clickbait due in the next hour. So when analytics show "where did COVID come from" needs a story, and there is the prime directive of Orange Man Bad, anything that would give Trump's anti-China stance the slightest credence would be prima facie Debunked. And thus it was a dangerous racist hoax. Until Trump was gone, at which point it wasn't.
As I understand it, there's _no_ evidence for the wet market theory. It's assumed, because that's typically the sort of place that these weird crossovers happen, and because the known genealogies of covid19 show the "parent" strains as occurring nowhere near each other, meaning the animals would've had to have been far out of their range.
"We have plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are *kinds* of evidence!"
They _are_ evidence, just (very) weak evidence.
Plenty of circumstantial evidence though. Which is the best we can expect considering the CPC was generously given 12+ Months to cover their tracks.
That's why it made so much sense for the media to spend months talking about wet markets and bat soup, because of all the evidence.
The lab leak theory has always been worthy of further investigation for the simple astounding coincidence that a hitherto unknown virus appeared in Wuhan, home of a one of the few BSL4 labs in China, over a thousand kilometers away from where its closest naturally occurring related virus was found. Instead of pursuing this angle, the media simply accepted the word of a group of epidemiologists led by one of the two people in the world most responsible if there was a leak, without considering for a moment that epidemiologists are just as likely to close ranks around one of their colleagues as police are around a fellow cop accused of brutality. Then, at the start of a virus pandemic the likes of which the Wuhan lab was supposedly set up precisely to prevent and combat, the Chinese government shut down the lab and made all its research data unavailable. Why would they do that?
These facts alone warranted intense investigation into the origins of the virus, especially by the newly enlightened "science followers" who, presumably, would have liked to know where the virus came from and how another similar outbreak might be prevented.
Instead, the media bluecheck stenographers displayed a breathtaking lack of curiosity about where this new virus actually came from, especially considering their noisily expressed embrace of "science."
The national media and their friends at Big Tech deserve all the crow they will eat now (assuming any of them can be embarrassed, which I doubt).
But, if you think about it, once the totally insane practice of demonizing the always entirely reasonable lab leak theory as a "racist conspiracy theory" burned itself out (which was inevitable, due to the lab leak theory being quite strong on the merits) -- once the burning-out happened, how *else* was the culture going to self-correct other than by going through a period of "dunkage", i.e. overendorsing the lab leak theory and under-endorsing the "zoonosis not in a lab" theory? Seriously, I can't imagine any other way our culture has of doing this: "dunking" is precisely the sociological ritual we have at our disposal. We have no other way of adjusting the rudder.
At any rate, the real issue was the incredible degree of censorship and demonization of a reasonable and important scientific hypothesis which deserved to be aired. A discursive "overcorrection" may be happening now, sure -- but note that, to this day, nobody is censoring or demonizing the "zoonosis not in a lab" theory. So, the overcorrection doesn't seem to be *too* bad, really. The media did a horrible job with this one (FB's censorship policies being the worst offender), and since dunking on them is the one price for them that exists in our culture, I say bring on the posterization Olympics.
"I am not really in the habit of defending the media."
You have a marvelous gift for understatement, Freddie.