Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵THREAD🧵

Do you remember how bad the media’s “Covid lab leak” - the hypothesis that the virus came from a lab - coverage was?

I thought I did. But it was a more dramatic example of uniform media malpractice than even I remembered.

So I revisited it. Buckle in, it’s long. ⤵️

It started in Feb 2020 when @SenTomCotton suggested looking into the CCP lab studying bats near the initial cases in Wuhan.

The media were outraged. In a since-updated piece, @washingtonpost said the idea was a “conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.”

It wasn’t just WaPo. Shortly thereafter, @nytimes trotted out a similar allegation, calling the lab leak hypothesis a “fringe theory” and a “tale” designed to inflame social media.

@CNN’s @ChrisCillizza said Cotton was “playing a dangerous game” with his suggestions.

@USATODAY, in a since-updated fact check, said that Cotton’s claims were “false” because “overwhelming scientific evidence” said so.

A quick pause here to point something out. What the media were up in arms about wasn’t the veracity of the lab leak idea.

Just that people thought it was *plausible*. That it “may” be true, as @SenTomCotton said.

Look how close the lab is to the first cases. “May” is too much?

Anyway, back to the coverage. This was the dawn of what I like to call “experts say” reporting, where an outlet finds someone with credentials who agrees with them to make the point the outlet wants to make.

Here’s @NatGeo, @Forbes, @CBSNews & @washingtonpost doing that here.

There were some even more dramatic examples I want to call out.

Maybe my all time favorite is from @NPR who, with the confidence that only that station posses, claimed that the lab leak theory had been “debunked” in April 2020.

This @ABC headline presented without comment

It was really a banner time period for outlets using “fact checkers” as a political weapon with no connection to facts, as @CNN does here.

The word of the year had to be “debunked,” which many outlets seemed to believe meant “we don’t like this idea.”

It’s impossible to ignore how this story intersects with Trump & his admin.

Once he said he believed the lab leak idea, the press decided it must be a lie.

Some really rich headlines here from @business (really?), @VICE (remember them?), @CNN (“crushed”!) and @BusinessInsider.

It’s really the condescending tone here from @chrislhayes that gets me.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I want to remind you that @NPR is funded in part by your tax dollars.

More on your tax dollars soon.

Just a quick aside. The press at the time purported to be very upset that Trump was using the same language that they had used a few weeks before, to describe the virus as Chinese.

Here’s @CNN.

Then a poll came out finding that lots of people believed the lab leak theory: about a third of Americans.

The press leapt to tar the believers as rubes & the people who convinced them as charlatans.

There’s a lot of this but a few from @CNN, @Forbes, @voxdotcom & @thehill.

One moment you may’ve forgotten: in April 2020, Trump stopped US funding to the lab in question in Wuhan.

Read: up until then, your tax dollars were paying for dubious research in an autocratic regime that maybe started a plague.

Naturally the media applauded that move, right?

Wrong. The press were incensed Trump would stop giving your tax dollars to a shady lab in China.

@CBSNews said it was “jeopardizing” a Covid cure. @nytimes did much the same. @ABC blamed the bad move on “conspiracy theories” as @VanityFair pointed to “right-wing disinformation.”

One phenomenon that really stuck with me is how the press elevated China’s claims in an effort to, I presume, stick it to Trump.

Look at how @nytimes, @CNN and @TIME put the U.S. and China on equal believability footings.

This wasn’t a mere momentary blip. All the way until December, @AP was writing up the lab leak as a conspiracy theory that survived online “despite facts.”

Right.

The enormous irony of the @AP story about Covid “conspiracy theories” is the image that accompanies it.

“Wear a mask outside” the 1984-esq wall art reads.

The real facts aren’t as hospitable to what the media was claiming in 2020.

Further investigation into the lab leak in 2021 gave the idea a respectability even the mainstream media couldn’t ignore. They started to change their tune. Here’s @nytimes

Then in 2023 Biden’s own Department of Energy said that the lab leak theory was the most likely explanation for Covid’s origins.

The side-by-sides of the original reporting vs the newly indisputable facts are what I see when I close my eyes at this point. @NPR

You probably don’t need me to spell it out for you, but you really can’t overstate the impact of the failure. When we should’ve been investigating what happened, the press had given social media platforms cover to censor the mere mention of the lab leak.

The media cheered along.

As a result of the media refusing to consider a politically inconvenient idea — and their need to throttle its very mention — we may never definitively know what caused a pandemic that’s killed millions and irrevocably changed the course of modern life.

And it may mean that some people get off scot-free for what they’ve done to play a role in that disaster.

Hard to imagine that wasn’t the goal all along, in my humble opinion.

There’s a lot more to this story than I could fit into a thread.

You can read a fuller analysis of the media failure and what it means here: open.substack.com/pub/drewholden…

Reminded me of my old pinned tweet, which may be my best, from April 2020.

As @joshrogin rightly notes, I was remiss to not mention that not everyone in the media got to the story wrong. Josh was one of the real bright spots in media coverage of this episode, like this piece from April: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

If you enjoyed this thread, I would really encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter, @holden_court.

In the coming days, I’m planning to announce more opportunities to discuss this and other reporting that I’ll be offering for free for a limited time.
open.substack.com/pub/drewholden…