Journalistic Integrity or Just Plain Dumb?
If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake
This incredible article is by Thomas Frank, a respected journalist and author (What's the Matter With Kansas? - an exercise in urban political myopia) who is a well-educated and well-read member of the liberal urban media. Here's an excerpt of his political touchstones:
Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.
[Ah, yes, it's Trump's fault. LOL.]
If an individual whose entire career and livelihood is wrapped up in 'getting it right' is so easily misled by our dominant media sources, what hope is there for the rest of us who have better things to do? Now he's wondering if he's gotten it all wrong and the larger consequences.
This is the problem with the urban corporate media that started to seriously degenerate after the 2000 election. But we have also learned how it started long before, as alternative media such as cable news, Talk Radio, and the Internet have presented an existential financial challenge for traditional media outlets, especially print newspapers and broadcast news.
Mr. Frank and his colleagues in corporate media (NYT, WaPo, LAT, Fox) need to undergo a serious bit of soul searching to discover if they have a role as the Fourth Estate in our information economy, or if they should just go pursue a career in real estate somewhere. Journalists today have to understand that nobody is going to hero worship them as the modern-day Woodward and Bernstein. Honest journalism and reputational capital is it's own reward and can actually be lucrative on platforms like SubStack.
So here is what Frank has discovered:
Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.
There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.
There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.
There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.
The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.
The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.
With this we get Mr. Frank's revelation:
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.
Yeah, no kidding. And that's a bad thing? It's doubly ironic that most of the voices haranguing us to "follow the science" were really constraining true science. Critical thinking is merely what real scientists have been telling us all along, as opposed to those succumbing to "political" science. There are no absolutes in science, only skepticism and hypothesis testing - this applies to the pandemic as well as climate change and systemic racism and Modern Monetary Theory. And mea culpas won't save journalists from the anvils of "I told you so's" that will rain down upon their heads.