WE’VE ENTERED SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH MATT YGLESIAS IS A VOICE OF MEDIA SANITY: The media’s lab leak fiasco.

What happened is that Tom Cotton raised this idea in February in his capacity as a China hawk, and then again in March as part of a nonsensical attack on Joe Biden. He got shouted down pretty hard by scientists on Twitter, by formal institutions, and by the media. Then this kind of pachinkoed down into being a politics story where writers and fact-checkers who didn’t cover science at all “knew” that this was a debunked story that right-wingers were pushing for their nefarious ends. I think it’s increasingly clear that this was a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse-policing, and there is in fact a serious scientific question as to where the virus came from — a question that we will probably never be able to answer because the Chinese government has clearly committed to one viewpoint on this and isn’t going to allow a thorough investigation. . . .

Cotton did one thing that those other sources didn’t do — he speculated a little. At the end of that clip he says “we still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

That is all not only true, but entirely consistent with what mainstream media was reporting at the time. But then things went horribly off the rails. . . .

So now we have leaped from “everyone agrees the Chinese government’s claims were wrong but Cotton is an outlier in claiming they were deliberately wrong” to “Cotton’s views should be associated with conspiracy theories and misinformation,” even though his core factual claim was not particularly different from what anyone was else was saying.

It’s not even that they misunderstood the facts. It’s that they didn’t care.