The media's lab leak fiasco - They validated the fake news allegation

 Yesterday I posted The scientific process combined with free speech is a powerful weapon to improve knowledge and overturn authoritarian mistakes.  One more member of the mainstream media, Matt Yglesias has joined the pivot with a critical broadside against the mainstream media narrative.  From this morning, The media's lab leak fiasco.  Even though it covers much of the same ground as yesterday's post, it is short enough to warrant a read due to a few additional insights.

As I believe I have said before, I spent the month of February 2020 intensely focused on covering the seemingly imminent victory of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary. I dedicated approximately 0% of my journalistic energy to covering what was, in retrospect, the clearly more significant story of a novel coronavirus outbreak starting in Wuhan, China and clearly spreading to other parts of the world.

I was aware of the virus in much the way that I am aware of the National Hockey League, but I wasn’t paying attention to it as a journalist. The first piece I published on Covid on March 12 holds up pretty well I think, but it was way too late in terms of the kind of tough travel restrictions that, in retrospect, the country needed.

Yglesias and Taibbi (in yesterday's post) I have respect for as journalists owing to their Classical Liberal viewpoint.  They are willing to make an argument and muster evidence for that argument.  They are not afraid to engage in the marketplace of ideas and are willing to cede points when they are demonstrably wrong.

They are relatively free of the social justice/critical theory cant to which so many shallow minded journalists are subject.  But they still suffer the other evil twin of media - political partisanship and rabid hatred of Republicans in general and Trump in particular.

My view is that both parties are pretty incompetent and corrupt (i.e. subject to special interests rather than the general good of all citizens.  Republicans have the redeeming feature of being much more ideologically diverse which makes them less effective but more representative.  Democrats are venal and seemingly constantly refining their venality.  

Yglesias betrays this in his allusion to his being too late in affirming the importance of tough travel restrictions.  Well . . . perhaps.  But it is readily memorable that Trump was widely mocked and denigrated in the mainstream media for proactively imposing tough travel restrictions before most other countries.  It was only later that they came to the reluctant conclusion that those Trump decision's were well reasoned and to some degree supported by the evidence.

Yglesias' whole article centers around the mainstream media's opposition to Senator Tom Cotton and some early statements he made, and illustrating how the mainstream media constantly distorted his statements to make it seem he was making easily rebuttable arguments which he was not in fact making.

It is an interesting read simply for that detailed postmortem of mainstream media failure.  It was not that they were getting facts wrong.  That happens in a fast news cycle.  It was that they were picking positions based on their politics and ideologies and then sticking with those positions long after there was strong evidence that it was an indefensible position.

It has been a fiasco for the media.  Yglesias asks a good question.  Has the failure been consequential.  He asks three specific questions:

A separate question that’s less clear to me is what follows from this in terms of policy. You can break this down into three questions:

Suppose the media had been more open to Cotton’s point back in February 2020 — what would we have done differently?

Suppose definitive evidence arises this Friday that the virus in some sense came from the Chinese lab — what would we do differently going forward?

Or suppose definitive vindication of the zoonotic origin theory emerges — what difference would that make?

I think in all three of these cases, the answer is basically that nothing would be different. This is not to apologize for the bad coverage but, if anything, to underscore how egregious it was to lean so heavily into the Tom Cotton Is Wrong narrative. The subsidiary premise of that narrative was always that Cotton was doing something extremely nefarious. But while Cotton does indeed have a lot of opinions I disagree with, it’s just not true that this lab leak idea is now or ever was very closely linked to any hot-button policy controversies.

 To some degree I agree "that nothing would be different" in terms of public health policy.

But there is a different question to be asked which Yglesias does not.  

Are there any negative consequences to the media's lab lek fiasco?

Here I think the answer is, Yes!

By restricting himself to the health consequences, Yglesias ignores one of the more important consequences - further erosion of trust in mainstream media.

The media was wrong and critical of Trump and Republicans not because of the facts but because of their political partisanship and ideological sympathies.  Their critical reporting of Tom Cotton's position and deliberate misrepresentation of his argument was not only unprofessional and shameful.  It put the mainstream media in the same narrative camp as the Chinese government.  

The media is now acknowledging that the Chinese argument was insufficient and that Tom Cotton's argument had real merit.  But it is not a good look to be in the same camp as repressive totalitarian regimes and then act repressively (deplatforming) and in an Orwellian and authoritarian fashion ("there is only one truth").

I am not arguing that journalists in the mainstream media are communists seeking to undermine America to benefit the Chines Communist Party.  I am arguing that the loss of economic viability and the rapid decline of journalistic social status is driving journalists to behaviors which make them indistinguishable from CCP supporters and from mindless America critics.  

Or in Yglesias' words:

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.

Sure.  But that is a narrow reading.

The broader reading is - Why does the mainstream media keep getting stories dramatically wrong and then defending the wrong narrative when new facts emerge.  They lock themselves into partisan positions regardless of facts and then mindlessly fight their corner.  Instead of providing a stream of facts and evidence to their readers so that readers can form their own opinions.

That is the negative consequence to this incident.  Nothing to do with health policy per se, just an affirmation of partisanship, obliviousness to facts, unprofessionalism and indifference to loss of brand and trust among news consumers.