Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_username | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time to take seriously any disinformation talk from the political and media establishment after the lab leak theory twist, where it had been shameful disinformation, until it suddenly wasn't. I have to be doubting publications even from reputable sources, after "The Lancet" fiasco, where the organizer of the open letter that condemned the lab leak theory was discovered to have ties with the lab in question, and some signatories confessed they'd signed it only because Trump had been promoting the theory. I can't help feeling that the recent war on "disinformation" is not waged in good faith. And since I have not so much trust in the alternative media either, I feel as a reasonable person I am easentially left in the dark.

View on HN

If you are on the fence then it might be worth re-reading what the NY times wrote about it back then.

For example, I could not find much wrong with this from February 2020:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...

It does (correctly, IMO) focus on the 'bioweapon' conspiracies rather than the 'lab leak' theory and mentions how the senator ended up distancing himself from the former.

And actually, the original letter in The Lancet might also not be entirely unreasonable? I cannot find fault with it, provided one interprets the phrase 'not have a natural origin' as 'engineered' (rather than 'leaked'). See here:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

You should of course feel free to disagree, but it might be worth reading these sources before continuing the discussion? And maybe there are other articles I missed?

With which version of Feb 2020 do you not find fault?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200217083402/https://www.nytim...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210724164846/https://www.nytim...

The first of these is a stub and might be unclear on the meaning of "originated in". Again, if you read it as "engineered" I do not think I can disagree with its content. The second is the one I referred to and seems to have appeared at most a day later.

Also - what exactly is your point? Like the other readers here I could probably be convinced that my example is bad, and you might even be able to make us adjust our opinion of the NY times. But right now I only see a suggestion of criticism rather than the raising of an actual issue. Would it be too much to ask you elaborate?

Ok, stubs a stub, fair enough. Here is a more substantive criticism:

In this article the author engages in a smear of the anthropogenic conjecture and of Sen Cotton by associations invented by the article itself. It may as well as ask "when did you stop beating your wife" as much as "when did Sen Cotton stop saying coronavirus was a bioweapon."

Truthfully the article never establishes that Sen Cotton claimed that coronavirus was a bioweapon. However, the author does take pain to characterize later statements as "Mr. Cotton later walked back the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon run amok." How does one walk back a statement that was never made?

I went back and listened to YouTube clips of Cotton during the time period [0, 1, 2 among them] and consistently I hear a person saying that coronavirus is bad, travel restrictions and quarantines are needed, and that the Chinese government is lying about the severity, chronology and origin of the disease. I didn't hear him making a claim of bioweapon.

I depended on YouTube's search function and then Cotton's own media appearance list for videos before the article's date of 2/18/2020 so maybe there was some other source where Cotton made a bioweapon claim that could be walked back? I visited Wikipedia's helpful COVID-19 Misinformation page and didn't find anything about Cotton [3]. I then checked Archive org for the same page from the NYT's article's time period and found a few mentions of Cotton [4]. Here were contemporaneous articles from a publication called "The Hill" from 2/2/2020 [5], CNN from 2/18/2020 [6], and Snopes (which excludes archive.org) of 4/1/2020 [7].

The Hill's mention of Cotton comes by way of the Chinese ambassador on a television show "Face The Nation:" Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai criticized Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday for suggesting the coronavirus could have been created in a Chinese biological warfare lab. That is the entirety of it. No link to what Cotton said or didn't say. In the Face The Nation transcript [8], Amb Cui doesn't claim Cotton said that. It's the interviewer that brings up Cotton claiming "And in fact, this week, Senator Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, suggested that the virus may have come from China's biological warfare program." Ok, so the Cotton statement must have been before 2/2/2020? Bookmark that for a moment.

CNN's article focuses on Cotton coming "under fire" for his statements about coronavirus. On Fox News Sunday morning, Cotton suggested the virus did not originate in an animal market as the Chinese government has claimed, but perhaps from another source, such as an infectious disease research lab nearby. While acknowledging there's no evidence the disease originated there, Cotton questioned the validity of China's statements, saying "China was lying from the beginning, and they're still lying today." At no point is Cotton quoted or documented in any way as claiming coronavirus is a bioweapon.

Snopes' writes It is speculative, however, to assert, as U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton did, that these actions were done to cover up a leak from a lab. citing the NYT article, completing the ourobouros of misinformation.

Back to Cotton from before 2/2/2020. Before 2/2 Cotton appears to be trying to raise the alert for coronavirus and advocating for travel controls (and includes exception for Americans, medics and disease researchers) and quarantines. [9, 10, 11]. Again, I don't hear anything about biowarfare.

CNN does link to a 2/16/2020 tweet [12] from the @SenTomCotton account in response to a Washington Post article [13]. The tweet is Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: and subsequent tweets delve into each hypo.

CNN also does quote Cotton with his rationale for speaking out about the wet market claim for the origins of coronavirus "Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China who have published a study in the international journal The Lancet have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market," Cotton said. "The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market."

Let no organization be entirely judged by its worst moments or by uncharacteristic best ones or by the actions of any single worker within it. I had expected to be quickly gratified by some Arkansas senator whose mouth went further than the facts. At the same time I remember Gell-Mann Amnesia [14] enough to not take one article's word for the facts. When I saw the heaps of other articles repeating and expanding on the NYT, I see unshadowed disinformation in action, an echochamber of bullshit.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7roTUfd35w

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT3txmbWxb4

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytGIkcCh7T8

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation

4. https://web.archive.org/web/20200715000000*/https://en.wikip...

5. https://web.archive.org/web/20200804003739/https://thehill.c...

6. https://web.archive.org/web/20210308045325/https://web.archi...

7. https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

8. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-cui-tiankai-on-face-...

9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT3txmbWxb4

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBsPh1Rq0Fw

11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjWm2GnuDn8

12. https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126?...

13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

14. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

15. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...

16. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

I missed this earlier, sorry and thank you for the well-researched post.

Among other things, I will happily agree with you that the Snopes page is simply not correct. I will not hold the NY times responsible for that, however.

As you have surely seen, in his twitter thread the senator does list "the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis" as a possible option, and also says that "the so-called experts" do not really know any better.

So I can see the viewpoint of the NY times: it is newsworthy if a senator lends credence to a possibility that scientists widely dismissed. As an analogy, a senator who believes that the earth is flat might be equally interesting for a news publication - even if it is masked by phrases like 'we need to keep an open mind', 'the experts might be wrong', etc -- 'the earth might be flat' is simply not a reasonable position for a senator to hold.

But I can also see your point. It was early days of the pandemic and there were lots of unknowns. The general gist of the argument was one of caution and keeping an open mind towards all possibilities, which was healthy. And for a senator it would have been hard at those times to distinguish between something that scientists almost universally dismissed and something that they were still debating about.

Perhaps we can agree that the newsworthiness of the content of the NY times article was not entirely obvious, and the reasons it was published anyway could have been political (even if this was not consciously done). Based on your research it seems that the resulting storm of negative publicity by other outlets was not justified.

Agree totally that NYT's framing of Cotton's position and statements was not reality based. If it exists, political bias is less significant than confirmation bias and echo chamber effects. Snopes has no excuse for not performing a basic check of NYT editorialized claims.

Please read the NYT editorial (2/17) [0] and Cotton's tweet (2/16) [1] again. The NYT claimed "Mr. Cotton later walked back the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon run amok." There is no walk back in that tweet. There is a continued questioning of the Chinese food market claims. Bioweapon is placed within the less likely range of different possibilities that start with natural transmission, noted by Cotton as being "still the most likely."

The tweet is in response to claims by a Washington Post article [2], later corrected with the statement "Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term “debunked” and The Post’s use of “conspiracy theory” have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus."

I'd like to visit your statement As you have surely seen, in his twitter thread the senator does list "the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis" as a possible option, and also says that "the so-called experts" do not really know any better.

The full final tweet in the thread is "We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."

In your statement it sounds like Cotton is claiming experts aren't a good source for judging among possibilities. I think a stronger text-based interpretation is that he is writing about _transparency_ and that some people who are claimed as experts don't want transparency.

At least two of Cotton's public statements focused on Covid origins cited the Huang et al Lancet article [3] which was authored by physicians on the scene. Cotton didn't lend "credence to a possibility that scientists widely dismissed." He drew attention to the fact that there was authentic scientific disagreement with the claims of Chinese authorities about the origins.

The tragedy in all this is that the hypothesizing the virus' origin wasn't the significant part of the message. It was an example for the broader point that the outbreak was serious and that Chinese authorities were not behaving with candor. The specific analogy Cotton made repeatedly was to the Soviet Chernobyl response.

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20200217083402/https://www.nytim...

1. https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126?...

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

This is a good point I feel is often lost. There is a difference between "it's possible a coronavirus that was being studied leaked from a lab" vs. COVID was a bioweapon the Chinese Gov purposefully unleashed on the world.

Because the bioweapon theory was the prominent one early on (and it was spread at a time when hate crimes against ethnic Chinese were exploding) you can see why it was shut down.

The more reasonable idea of a virus taken from nature, studied in a lab, then escaping, was not the narrative labeled as a "conspiracy" last year.

"When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?" ― John Maynard Keynes

The facts didn't change. Only the narrative did.

What are the facts that changed, in this lab leak story?

As far as I'm aware, our knowledge of the real-world facts haven't changed -- we're still in a position of great uncertainty. All that's changed is how various commentators are dealing with that uncertainty: they had been downplaying it, now they're acknowledging it.

In this case what facts changed?

Changing minds is ok. Shaming and suppressing discussions outside the consensus is not ok.

The facts didn’t change, only who was stating them.

If the story was “Trump points to Covid leaking from lab in China, evidence is a sparse” then ok cool.

But the story was “Lab leak conspiracy theory has been proven false but Trump continues to claim it’s true increasing Anti-Asian hate crimes”

Then Biden starts to comment on it and like a light switch the theory becomes credible, even “likely”. And all the newspapers act like they had been saying that all along.

I feel the story was your former example, not the latter. If anyone dismissed it as "proven false", they were wrong. But at the time (and now) there still is no evidence for it, which is an important detail when discussing.

This is an issue with your perception of the reporting, not what actually happened.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-ban-on-posts-asse...

You’ve got a very short memory.

Facebook was banning accounts that even brought it up.

Man made virus leaked intentionally =/ nature virus that escaped by accident. The latter is what is being discussed as possible, the former was and still is a deranged conspiracy.

You're actually conflating two different things, in case it wasn't clear.

"These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others." ― Groucho Marx

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/09/groucho-principles/

…or possibly someone else (Samuelson? Romney/Churchill? Groucho Marx?) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/

> I have a hard time to take seriously any disinformation talk from the political and media establishment after the lab leak theory twist, where it had been shameful disinformation, until it suddenly wasn't.

The "lab leak" theory hasn't actually changed any. Intelligence has the same conclusions as they had last year, they don't know. The only thing that has "changed" is the rabid reporting on the subject, either calling it 100% not true or "highly likely". Both conclusions are false, and any outlet reporting it as either one doesn't deserve your time.

> and some signatories confessed they'd signed it only because Trump had been promoting the theory

Source?

Do you have a source for your claim?

It's a hard one. Trump was promoting it when there was not enough evidence and was acting as it it was obvious. As a scientist you need to be much more careful and precise in what you say. As far as I can tell, what we have now are some very strong cues, but still no definitive proof (that might be impossible to have without the cooperation of the Chinese government).

I would expect the president of the united states to have much more information available to him than the rest of the country.

IIRC, Trump didn't start blaming China until China started blaming the USA for the spread during the military games that happened during the fall.

Trump clearly is inconsistent on this front, since the entire IC was warning him about russian interference and that Putin specifically was doing everything in his power(while still maintaining plausible deniability) to get him into office.

I think we can safely discard the notion that Trump would be reporting on anything the IC tells him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com