zlacker

>>pseudo+(OP)
Current bottom line:

- 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.

>>baybal+5u
This story continues to evolve and it's exciting to watch the new reporting come to light and slowly flesh out the details. The "lab escape hypothesis" was disregarded by many (if not most) media outlets as a conspiracy theory early on.

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).

>>Jeremy+K81
> This story continues to evolve

Everything listed by GP was known a year ago, which is why it was so frustrating to get dismissed as conspiracy theory.

>>Izkata+Ik1
This is what Trump meant by "fake news". As much as the HN crowd hates him, he's right about that. We don't have a regular report-the-news media in the US anymore, we have a propaganda arm of the authoritarian left and a satellite network of reactionary right wing outlets that are about as bad. Glenn Greenwald has had some excellent writing about this recently.

My general position is that if something is reported by a mainstream media outlet, there's a good chance that the opposite is true.

>>xanaxa+qs1
Trump boasted news networks like Fox, OANN, and NewsMax, which arguably are the least credible sources out there.

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.

>>manuel+1u1
The trouble is the NYT and others still claim to be objective and not really partisan. They still market themselves as the bastion of real journalism.

At least with fox and oann you know they are fully partisan.

>>zpeti+1x1
Partisanship is on a scale. It is not a binary thing.

NYT may be partisan, yes, but, qualitatively speaking, it's laughable to compare NYT and OANN or NewsMax. They are not even in the same business.

>>manuel+AB1
It’s very easy to come to that conclusion about your own sides media. Perhaps you should ask some republicans about how objective the NYT is, and ask for evidence. You might be surprised.

>>zpeti+hD1
CNN or the NYT are also reporting differing arguments/facts and correct themself if they made a mistake. Havent seen that happening on OANN or NewsMax without a court order.

>>Paradi+MW1
For a contrasting point of view, here's an article from a conservative, religious writer who follows how the media covers religion stories from 2014. In this article (and is a common theme in his writing), he discusses "Kellerism" a term named after Bill Keller, a former New York Times editor who said in 2011 how the New York Times does not seek balance in a whole bunch of areas. The author, Terry Mattingly, has over the years documented many cases in which CNN, NYT and other similar outlets don't cover stories that intersect with religion or religously affiliated people or communities fairly (seemingly, in many cases, because the authors covering the stories lack the basic knowledge to even raise questions allowing for balance).

https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2014/8/2/this-keller...