THE PASSIVE VOICE IS SURE DOING A LOT OF WORK HERE: ‘We Were Badly Misled’ Says the New York Times As They Admit COVID Lab-Leak Theory Was True.
Maybe the Times means Xi Jinping’s administration? Because it certainly wasn’t Trump’s:
Pressure from who in the administration? President Trump was pretty adamant about calling it the ‘China virus.’
And why didn’t The New York Times bother sending a reporter or two to do some digging on this?
We all know why. Because if they thought it could hurt Trump to investigate, they would have.
Tom Cotton was routinely called a racist for referring to the lab leak origin – in February of 2020. To which a variety of Democrat house organs, including the Times, responded:
“Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” lamented the Times, before accusing Cotton of contributing to an “infodemic.”
“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” explained the Post, which later issued issued a correction that still characterized the theory as “fringe.”
The Daily Beast declared that he was promoting a “Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Dismissed by Actual Scientists.”
Tom Nichols, a cable news “conservative” who has since been rewarded with a staff writer position at The Atlantic, approached Cotton’s comments even more scornfully. When Cotton pointed out to detractors that he had not said that the virus had originally been developed as a bioweapon by the Chinese government, and that there were several hypotheses worth exploring, Nichols responded by calling it an example of “why arguing with a conspiracy theorist rarely goes well.”
“It gives the person advancing the theory to keep repeating it ‘just as a hypothesis,’ as Cotton does here. Every time you ask him, he’ll repeat it, say it’s unlikely, and then say he’s just asking questions,” continued Nichols. One might wonder if such questions are worth being asked — especially by the press. But Nichols left that to Cotton, instead opting to mock the senator for doing so.
Anne Applebaum, also a staff writer for The Atlantic as well as a member of the advisory panel for the Global Disinformation Index, compared Cotton’s comments to those of “Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS.”
As late as May of 2021, Apoorva Mandavilli, the Times’ replacement for veteran chief science reporter Don McNeil, who was forced off the paper during 2020’s culture war, was tweeting:
With today’s Times’ headline, we’ve entered into “Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia” territory:
