Ed already wrote about this earlier today but I had a few additional thoughts. First, it is galling to see the NY Times post an opinion piece five years later claiming the author (and implicitly all journalists) were misled about the lab leak theory. As Ed pointed out, we knew many of the things mentioned in the piece in 2020 or at the latest by early 2021. So why has it taken so long to get to this point?
The obvious answer is the correct one in this case: The whole thing became political. With President Trump and some conservatives, like Sen. Cotton, leaning into the lab leak theory, there was a knee-jerk reaction in the media that whatever they were saying must be wrong and should be ridiculed. That impulse did not serve the media (or the country) well in this case.
The comments on this article are instructive about how that works and the fact that for…
