- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.
- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses
- Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
- Chinese authorities were scrambling, and suppressing reporting as early as November, seemingly with a very good idea what they are up to.
This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco. Any time news outlets are credulously repeating the words of "government officials," you need to seriously devalue the reporting. Reporting isn't just being a mouthpiece for the state, and these outlets fail us when they express such a high degree of certainty before there's any independent verification of the facts.
Of course, everything you describe is still "circumstantial," and it's wise to remain skeptical. However, even if we somehow eventually confirm this was not a lab escape, there's absolutely no excuse for the certainty expressed by the NYT et al in their early reporting (which is true for so much of the other COVID-19 media coverage - the media did a terrible job of expressing uncertainty with very incomplete information throughout the entire affair).
Everything listed by GP was known a year ago, which is why it was so frustrating to get dismissed as conspiracy theory.
My general position is that if something is reported by a mainstream media outlet, there's a good chance that the opposite is true.
Fox lawyers even argued that the Tucker show is not "news", and should not be treated as such.
So, no, he was not right about this either. He just peddled the idea that the only credible broadcasts were the ones praising him.
Not the exact term itself, but the significancy of it. The "lying press" is a pejorative used since at least the XIX century [1].
Are we looking for 100% reliability here? Then, yes, we could call the NYT or the WP "fake news". But that is just hyperbole, directed at creating doubt and uncertainty where it does not exist. Once Trump followers had a excuse to label the NYT as "partisan" or "fake", it was easy for Trump to steer the narrative any way he wanted.