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.
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…
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The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.
The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?
But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.
Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.
Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.
But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.
The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.
I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.
Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”
The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.
Quick 🧵⤵️
A couple quotes:
“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.
What? What does that even mean??
That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?
Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”
Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.
Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.
That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.
Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.
Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.
That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.”
I’m not sure people realize just how egregious some of NPR’s “journalism” has been. Amid the debate about defunding the network, I wanted to walk down memory lane to revisit some of its worst coverage.
There’s a lot. ⤵️
First, perhaps the most egregious display of activist journalism: their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story of corruption involving a major party candidate on the eve of the election.
Not only did @NPR not cover it, they bragged about refusing to do so.
Insofar as @NPR did cover the Hunter Biden scandal, they actively tried to cover it up.
They applauded Facebook & Twitter strangling the story as part of a push against “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
The story, of course, turned out to be far from invented.