Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate? – UnHerd

At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump s travel ban to and from China as isolationist . It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China s economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemic s origins. And it celebrated China s success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCP s absurd mortality numbers at face value, reporting in August 2020 that 4,634 Chinese people died from the virus and, six months later, that there were 4,636 total deaths. That in a country of 1.4 billion people only two people died of Covid-19 in the half a year defies logic and common sense. Still, the Times legitimised the CCP numbers by printing them as hard fact.

via unherd.com