The NYT's egregious misreporting of the lab leak theory

The Bell Riots Review is a bit late to this party—but has one newish, hopefully useful thing to contribute, which is an overview focusing on the egregious way the New York Times in particular misreported the lab leak theory between February of 2020 and March of 2021.

Why am I singling out the New York Times? After all, isn’t Facebook surely the worse actor here, since they spent over a year literally banning and censoring articles arguing for a lab leak etiology of COVID19? My thinking is that the NYT occupies one of a small handful of extremely important apex niches within the ecosystem of opinion-making and consensus-formation among the U.S.’s high-credentialed professional-managerial class (which is arguably America’s newest dominant class, though I’m prepared to be re-convinced, as I used to be, that the dominant class is simply the old-fashioned owns-the-means-of-production class).

The New York Times has such a degree of gravitas that when they call the arguments of a former CDC director “debunked” (see below), or when, elsewhere, they refer to the same group of arguments as “fringe” (see below), it puts people associated with those arguments on the defensive in a way that doesn’t happen if these campaigns of rhetorical stigmatization were coming merely from other legacy media, or merely from new media and/or social media. I heard someone say on a podcast recently that if the New York Times were a department of government, we’d all immediately recognize it as one of the most powerful departments of government. And it’s in that spirit that I am singling them out here.

BTW, there’s some really amazing reporting out there these days about the lab leak theory of COVID19’s origin and the depth of circumstantial evidence in this direction (though let me reiterate that the evidence so far is only circumstantial). Vanity Fair has one of the most detailed and comprehensive articles. Everyone should read it. The NYT itself has now more or less caught up with reality when it comes to this topic (reality being: we don’t know where it came from, but lab leak origin theory is sufficiently reasonable and plausible that it deserves to be taken seriously and does not merit stigmatization).


Let’s look at the New York Times’ reporting on the lab leak theory for over a year:

In Feb 2020, the NYT called the lab leak theory a “fringe theory”—certainly a stigmatizing turn of phrase. This article also engaged in what I’d call rhetorical trickery to create the false impression that Sen. Tom Cotton proposed that COVID19 was released, maybe intentionally, from a bioweapons lab. But, as has now been widely documented and discussed (see for instance the Matthew Yglesias post), Cotton did not say this. What he actually said was that COVID19 may have come from the laboratory in Wuhan, and that the matter should be investigated; this is the position of the Biden Administration too.

During spring of 2020, the New York Times stuck with this pattern of committing rhetorical and story-framing energy to stigmatizing the lab leak theory. Here is an example from March 2020. The rhetoric opening this article: “First, there were conspiratorial whispers on social media that the coronavirus had been cooked up in a secret government lab in China. Then there were bogus medicines: gels, liquids and powders that immunized against the virus.”

Here is the Times in April 2020, rhetorically linking the lab leak theory to the narrative-framing of “Trump officials are pressuring spies to find evidence for lab leak theory”—as if the situation were analogous to Bush officials’ pressuring intelligence operatives in 2002-03 to find evidence for WMDs in Iraq.

This example from May 2020 is more subtle but also contributed to the pattern. The interviewee, Julian Barnes, says that “in fact, scientists are pretty skeptical that this came from the Wuhan lab. They believe there had to be an intermediate step from the bat viruses that were studied in the lab to another animal. And so the growing body of scientific voices is pushing against what Pompeo is saying right now.” This rhetoric is aimed at conveying the idea of an emerging scientific consensus against lab leak etiology—when in fact, as has been amply documented and discussed elsewhere, there was no scientific consensus about COVID19’s etiology and never has been any such scientific consensus. The Times podcast interviewer does not push back on this point and instead commits rhetorical energy towards reinforcing it, and suggesting that the lab leak theory is geopolitically irresponsible.

During summer of 2020, the NYT mostly did not mention the lab leak theory at all. However, one piece ran which actually lent credence to the idea, though this portion of the discussion is very lede-buried in the article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/health/coronavirus-origin-china-lucey.html

This story ran as COVID19 infection rates were coming down all over the US during the hot months of summer, and headlines were generally ditching COVID19 as their main story and instead shifting towards the anti-police protests (slash riots). After this point, the NYT was mostly silent about the lab leak theory for many months. I do wonder whether some important editors there decided that the spring 2020 arc of reporting had been too quick to dismiss the lab leak story, and now the editorial office was taking a step back and waiting for a new wave of info before re-approaching the topic.

But then, in March 2021, one of the most extraordinary examples of the NYT’s dismissal and stigmatization of the lab leak theory occurred — extraordinary not just for how recently this was, but also for the rhetorical aggression at play, and for the stature of the person it was directed against. A NYT headline (screenshot below) said that virologist and former CDC director Robert Redfield was favoring a “debunked COVID19 origin theory” in arguing for the plausibility of a lab leak etiology. This was a remarkable charge to lob in the direction of someone like Redfield, especially given that there was no new evidence against the lab leak theory at this point. To the contrary: by March 2021 it was already being reported within the mainstream press that some lab workers at the Wuhan Virology lab had fallen sick during fall 2019—which in and of itself proves nothing about COVID’s origin, but it’s a valuable tidbit of circumstantial evidence that made lab leak theory look a bit stronger in March 2021 than it had looked a year previously (and, a year previously it had already looked sufficiently strong that charges of being “fringe” were unwarranted).

The NYT headline editors’ decision to double down on “debunked” at the precise moment that the “Wuhan lab workers were getting sick in fall 2019” story was making the rounds is significant and shouldn’t slip through the cracks of historical memory.

Three days later, the NYT, to its credit, altered this headline to remove the word “debunked.” Also to its credit, the NYT didn’t engaging in “stealth-editing”, a journalistically irresponsible practice they’ve engaged in at other times over the last year or so. I can’t help but wonder if they changed the headline because they got a call from someone in the Biden White House who knew Biden was about to order a more serious investigation of the lab leak theory. Screenshots of original headline and follow-up editorial note below:

Headline during March 26-29 2021:

Editorial correction March 29 2021:

In sum: the New York Times’ reporting about the scientific debate on COVID19’s etiology has been a toxic discursive factor during this period of crisis. When there’s a scientific debate, having the most prestigious news organization on the planet stigmatize one side of that debate does not help scientists get to the truth more efficiently.