The Journalists Who Smeared Tom Cotton and Tarnished Their Own Reputations Over the Lab Leak Theory

Isaac SchorrFeb 27th, 2023, 12:17 pm
 

When Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) first suggested that the deadly, hyper-contagious virus that reared its head in Wuhan, China in 2019 might have something to do with the laboratories conducting dangerous research on similar viruses in the city, the press dismissed his case with prejudice.

Cotton wasn’t just wrong, they said, he was a conspiracy theorist and quite possibly a racist. Comments he made during an interview on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo in February 2020 — “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says” — were treated as not just factually mistaken, but morally repugnant.

Time has been kinder to Cotton than his critics, though. A new Wall Street Journal report revealed that the Department of Energy now believes the lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origin to be the one with the most evidence supporting it.

That’s not definitive proof that the lab leak theory is correct; the department has reached that conclusion with “low confidence,” and other agencies disagree. But it does demonstrate that the contrived disgust with Cotton’s tentative suggestion of a connection between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Covid-19 was the product of ignorance as well as partisan interest.

And while Cotton has been magnanimous, it’s important for news consumers to remember the names of those who misled them.

Two they might be familiar with are the New York Times and Washington Post, arguably the two most venerated institutions in print journalism. On February 17, 2020, the day after Cotton’s interview on Fox, both ran a variation of the same headline.

“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.”

On Face the Nation, CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan turned to an envoy of the Chinese Communist Party in an apparent effort to debunk Cotton, asking the Chinese ambassador to the United States to respond to Cotton and then posting the clip with the caption NEW: @AmbCuiTiankai dismisses #coronavirus conspiracy theories pushed by @SenTomCotton that it’s being used as biological warfare as “absolutely crazy.”

Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, also leaned on the word of the accused in an effort to prove Cotton wrong.

“A top virologist here in Singapore took me to the lab where the pure coronavirus is stored (secure behind several more airtight security doors),” tweeted Engel. “She’s convinced virus came from bats, NOT some bioweapon that broke out. And she’s personally worked at the lab in Wuhan in question.”

CNN published a fact check of the Arkansas senator quoting a pair of scientists unsympathetic to the lab leak theory, quibbling with Cotton’s definition of “quarantine,” and touting the defense that the World Health Organization, which had claimed a few weeks earlier that there was “no clear evidence” that the virus was capable of human-t0-human transmission, mounted of Chinese case count numbers.

Also worthy of dishonorable mention are Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast (“When he’s not spreading conspiracy theories online he’s trying to go to war with everyone, the Times‘ Jamelle Bouie (“Tom Cotton is one of the most irresponsible and dangerous people in federal office”), and the Post‘s Jennifer Rubin “Cotton either has become an irrational conspiracy monger or he has contempt for voters.”)

Even as evidence for the lab leak theory proliferated, some held fast to the idea that the lab leak theory was the creation of cranks. Responding to another Journal report that three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had come down with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019 in May 2021, Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times science reporter mainly dedicated to covering the pandemic during the plague years tweeted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not today.”

She appears to have laid out a blueprint for defending the media’s attempted squashing of the story.

In the wake of the more recent Journal story, progressive journalists are protesting criticism of their class by following Mandavilli’s example. CNN columnist Jill Filipovic, for example, posited that “Trump’s racist ‘China virus’ bullshit, which resulted in lots of anti-Asian bigotry and attacks on Asian people, put liberals understandably on the defense against any theory that seemed to blame China for Covid.”

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan concurs. “The simple reason why so many people weren’t keen to discuss the ‘lab leak’ *theory* is because it was originally conflated by the right with ‘Chinese bio weapon’ conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies. Blame the conspiracy theorists,” argued Hasan.

And yet, the record shows that it’s the media that insisted on the “bio weapon” conflation. Moreover, while some critiques of Dr. Anthony Fauci go too far, much of the frustration with him can be attributed to his own failings, which included intentional deceptions as well as mistakes, including his dismissal of the lab leak theory.

The knee-jerk aversion to Tom Cotton’s floating of an eminently plausible theory about a genocidal totalitarian government produced no shortage of strange reactions, including deference to that regime and accusations of bigotry against its critics. But what’s stranger still is that they’ve responded to contrary information not with humility, but still more self-righteous indignation.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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