The Media’s COVID Failure – Persuasion
It appears that for the past year, our media seemed to lock arms in shielding the Chinese government from the scrutiny it deserved for failing to control the virus. Whether or not the lab-leak hypothesis bears out, it is clear that our nation s journalists did not approach this question with an open mind.
In a tweet that she later deleted, Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times science reporter who has been on the coronavirus beat, offered a window into the mindset of much of the media: Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.
Is it really supposed to be racist to consider the possibility that the Chinese government failed to prevent the virus that causes COVID-19 from escaping from a government lab? The other leading origin theory that the virus emerged from China’s lightly regulated wet markets would place more of the blame on local culture than the lab-leak hypothesis, which directly implicates the government (and only the government).
Perhaps Mandavilli s revealing tweet is emblematic of a wider mindset among American journalists, many of whom saw their mission as simply opposing any stance taken by the Trump administration former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has long suspected that the virus leaked from the lab in Wuhan while also burnishing their anti-racist and anti-imperialist credentials by refusing to blame a foreign government for the pandemic.
But the goal of journalism shouldn t be to craft the most culturally sensitive or partisan narrative. The goal of journalism is to seek the truth. The consequences of telling the truth should be secondary to getting the truth out there in the first place, even if it makes the Trump administration or Republican Senators look good or the Chinese government look bad.
It shouldn’t be necessary to say this obviously but alas.