Getting Things Terribly Wrong

As I wrote in my last post, it's all-of-a-sudden become fashionable among many left-leaning media outlets (that encompasses the vast majority of all major media outlets) to talk openly about the origins of COVID-19. No matter that these hypocrites were the first to label anyone who even suggested that the origins were not the "wet market" or a bat cave in China as a "conspiracy theorist" or "unhinged." No matter that social media literally censored any post that suggested that the Wuhan Virology Lab may have been the source. No matter that the Democrats circled their collective wagons to protect the Chinese Communist Party because Donald Trump has the temerity to question China's actions in the months before the virus turned into a pandemic. Nah, that was all perfectly acceptable, until it wasn't.

The NY Post was one of the conservative outlets that was censored (by Facebook) for suggesting that the origin of COVID-19 was the Wuhan Virology Lab. Sohrab Amani comments:

Is there something in the California water that makes Silicon Valley’s censorious dweebs so damned shameless?

On Wednesday, Facebook ­revised its policy of banning posts suggesting the coronavirus was man-made — because the COVID situation is, er, “evolving,” as a spokesman told Politico.

Gee, thanks. The flip-flop comes more than a year after the social-media giant banned a well-reasoned Post opinion column by China scholar Steven Mosher that speculated about a potential lab leak. Will our columnist receive an apology? Of course not. But it’s the American people who should be holding the Menlo Park ­tyrants to account.

Think about it: If you were Xi Jinping, and you wanted to deploy an information-control operation over the origins of COVID-19, you couldn’t have done better than to just let Facebook, working in conjunction with America’s bottom-feeding “fact-checking” industry, do its thing.

The Chi-Coms, after all, were held in odium in the US eye long before the first COVID cases arrived: How much more effective — and devious — to have a gazillion-dollar US tech firm shut down public inquiry into the ­virus’ origins, and that with the help of well-credentialed “experts” and “fact-checkers.”

The mainstream media are now ruled by one idologically-driven narrative after another. They have become propagandists, not journalists. Any thing, any fact, any person that challenges their narrative is to be attacked, censored, and buried in a blizzard of ridicule and criticism. Any claim—no matter how compelling will not be investigated if it runs counter to their narrative. In fact, the claim will be labelled as "debunked" and dismissed. All of that and more happened during 2020 with the Wuhan Lab story. Now we learn that the media was very, very wrong, but no one will be held to account.

But there's a story inside the story. If the media can call a reasonable claim a "conspiracy theory" or label it as "unhinged," if it can refuse to investigate, censor on a whim, attack legitimate people and hard facts, we're all in trouble. And it can.

The editors at Issue and Insights comment on the ramifications for another story that has been labeled a "conspiracy theory" or "unhinged:"  

... even as the press grudgingly admits that it horribly mishandled the Wuhan lab leak story and in the process needlessly besmirched those who brought it up,  these same outlets are playing the same game with the election fraud story. 

As with the lab leak theory, we have been told repeatedly that there is no evidence to back it up. We’re told that court cases alleging election fraud were dismissed. We’re told, as with the Wuhan lab story, that the experts all agree that there’s no truth to election fraud claims. And we’re told that anyone who suggests fraud took place in the November 2020 elections is a Trump-loving conspiracy nut.

Here’s a typical headline, this one from CNN: “Arizona, Georgia audits move forward as Republicans continue to push election fraud lies.”

And as with the lab leak story, the narrative being peddled by the press just happens to fit into their political bias. The press was happy to dismiss the Wuhan lab story because President Trump was among those suggesting it. They’re happy to dismiss any claims of election fraud for the same reason.

Never mind that, as with the lab leak story, there is reason to doubt the media’s chosen narrative. There’s no question that strange things were happening on election night. There is no doubt that the Democrats’ push for universal mail-in balloting made fraud easier to commit. There are reasons to doubt several of the official election counts.

A credible press would investigate such claims on their own, and even call for their own audits – as they did after the disputed Florida election in 2000 when they sent armies of reporters down to the state to conduct their own ballot recounts.

But no. The press will allow no one to make such claims without labeling them “conspiracy mongers,” or “ridiculous,” or calling any such claims “fringe theory,” “baseless,” a “myth” or any of the other pejoratives they so assuredly hurled at those mentioning the Wuhan lab. States that are prudently enacting election integrity laws are routinely demonized as trying to “restrict” or “suppress” voting to appease Trump’s warped fantasies.

Of course, the lab origin theory for COVID may in the end not pan out, just election audits might not turn up evidence of massive fraud. But what we are seeing more and more is what happens when the press decides that its job isn’t to report the news but to push a biased and partisan narrative. They get things terribly wrong.

And in the end no one pays a price for getting "things terribly wrong," accept the general public who believe (probably naively) that getting things right is the media's job.

POSTSCRIPT:

"Getting things terribly wrong" might very well be the point for the propaganda media. The best time to investigate any allegation is immediately after the occurrence—not months or years later when evidence dissappears, records can be manipulated or "lost," witnesses "unexpectedly" cannot be found or change their stories, and memory of the event wanes among the public. 

So gaslighting or censoring questions about the event, saying it has been "debunked," refusing to do any legitimate investigation, and otherwise obfuscating the known facts protects a false narrative (pretty much the only narrative promulgated by the propaganda media), even if, after time passes, the illegitimacy of the false narrative becomes apparent.

Given that reality, it's unlikely that we'll ever get to the bottom of either the Wuhan or 2020 election stories. Enough time has now passed, and the fog of uncertainty has rolled in. The ideologues who supported the original narrative have won. The rest of us have lost.