Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if there’s one thing the American media does well, it’s come together to deflect attention away from its collective misdeeds. (emphasis added): <\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Media outlets that had once\u00a0definitively debunked the lab-leak theory<\/a>\u00a0innovated a new journalistic genre:\u00a0the un-debunking<\/a>. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who\u2019d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory\u2019s proponents \u2014 or, at least, to validate their good intentions. \u201cWere news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually \u2018wrong\u2019 at the time,\u201d asked the very same\u00a0Washington Post<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that had savaged Senator Cotton, \u201cor did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?<\/strong>\u201d You won\u2019t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In other words, “the truth may change, but it is always what we say it is”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And nothing changes the definition of truth more than you-know-who:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included \u201cfalse claims about Covid-19,\u201d including the notion that the virus was \u201cman-made or manufactured.\u201d The decision was attributed to the \u201cevolving nature of the pandemic,\u201d but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What <\/em>had <\/em>evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users\u2019 ability to post \u201c<\/em>content that has been rated false<\/a>,\u201d or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn\u2019t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who \u201crate\u201d relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook\u2019s defense, <\/em>ABC News<\/a> absent-mindedly admitted, \u201cthe claims [<\/em>sic<\/em>] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.\u201d Enough said.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Because to the – there is no better term – clique that sees itself as running America’s media and messaging, it’s not even the medium that’s the message. It’s the messenger:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian\u00a0<\/em>Naomi Oreskes<\/a>\u00a0admitted that the \u201clab-leak theory\u00a0is\u00a0plausible.\u201d But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling \u201csome of the people promoting the claim\u201d \u2014 and Donald Trump, in particular \u2014 \u201cirrational.\u201d \u201cWe all judge messages by the messenger,\u201d this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough\u00a0<\/em>to buck the social pressures<\/a>\u00a0culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues\u2019 prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the \u201cidiotic conformity of the right\u2019s pseudo-journalistic apparatus\u201d had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its \u201cpropaganda.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n It’s hard to do anything but taunt big media anymore. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true. But if there’s one thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[416,130,426],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid19","category-tc-media-bias","category-orwell-overestimated-democrats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84558"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84570,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84558\/revisions\/84570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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