Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

This is an extraordinary account of the rise of DRASTIC. It suggests interesting things. What DRASTIC did is what the media, in principle, is supposed to do. This is the disinfectant of sunlight. But the media missed all of this.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-…

A handful of wackadoos are now congratulating themselves for having insisted, from the start, that it came from a lab. But they didn't do what DRASTIC did: find evidence to support their instinct.

If you insisted it came from a Wuhan lab before seeing any evidence, that's not because you're prescient; it's because you're as lazy as your journalistic confrères who swallowed the zoonosis story wholesale.

The only people who behaved like good journalists, in this story, are the ones who weren't journalists: DRASTIC et al. (Exceptions--the two Nicholases; both deserve honorable mentions.) So the story reveals the laziness and inadequacy of the professional media establishment--

both right- and left-wing. Both now devote vastly more time and column inches to repeating what their own side says, or denouncing the other side, than they do to research and reporting.

Still, even by these standards, the laziness was remarkable. (I do not exclude myself here.) Not until I read Wade's piece did I check the references in Daszak et al.'s now-infamous letter to Nature. None of us thought to do that. For a whole year.

And even the laziness and scientific illiteracy of journalists isn't as remarkable as the laziness and corruption of the scientific establishment. *They* didn't check the references, either. That's unforgivable--

for reasons that go even beyond the urgent importance of figuring out how a virus that's killed four million people and devastated the global economy emerged.

It's unforgivable because science is the last system of legitimate authority in the West. @RadioFreeTom, you'll be especially sensitive to this: When they can't be trusted, whole epistemic chains collapses--with inevitably deadly consequences.

What are the lessons here? Many, but first thoughts:

1) Perhaps at this point the function of the media is a narrow one. They exist to amplify stories once someone else has done the hard work,

and then offer a lot of ankle-biting partisan commentary. So maybe we can do without the media so long as we have robust protection for everyone's speech.

2) But that suggests one of the most sinister aspects of this story: Reddit *banned* @TheSeeker268 for discussing his ideas. His views were wrongthink. A better example of the harm of censorship is hard to imagine.

(I don't think this problem is simple. The amount of misinformation deliberately injected into the Western discourse by malevolent actors is a danger, too. But the solution isn't and can't be censorship, and this is why.)

3) How many important stories are we missing because journalists are lazy, dumb, and partisan? Surely a great many.