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The Washington Post and its so-called “fact-checker,” Glenn Kessler, are being slammed on social media for drawing attention to their “serious” reporting on the Wuhan lab leak theory.
“The media called the ‘lab leak’ story a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Now it’s prompted corrections — and serious new reporting,” Kessler wrote in a tweet Thursday that linked to a Post piece with that same sentence as its headline.
While the piece is legitimate, it’s the fact that the Post — and Kessler, specifically — got it so wrong in the first place that appears to be making people so angry.
Look at his tweet below:
The media called the ‘lab leak’ story a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Now it’s prompted corrections — and serious new reporting. https://t.co/iqFXpDs6Yg
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) June 10, 2021
“Serious reporting” and debate about the lab leak theory has been occurring throughout the entire coronavirus pandemic, but from non-left-wing establishment sources. To the Post’s credit, it admits this in its piece.
“The Daily Mail appears to have been the first major Western publication to suggest the virus had a human origin … [i]n an online story published Jan. 23 of last year. … The story was followed three days later by one in the Washington Times,” the piece reads.
“[T]he lab theory soon found an influential and mediagenic champion: Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who suggested at a Senate hearing that the virus may have originated in a Wuhan ‘superlaboratory’ and then appeared on Fox News programs hosted by Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo to repeat his suspicions,” it continues.
And for this, he was clowned by the establishment media. So was anyone, including fellow Sen. Ted Cruz, who dared to suggest there may be some truth to the theory:
I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves. https://t.co/TprMnaHSZL
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 1, 2020
Liberal establishment media “fact-checkers” labeled discussions about the lab leak theory “lunatic conspiracy theories.” These “fact-checks” were then used by big tech giants like Facebook and Twitter to censor anyone who discussed or reported on the theory, including legitimate conservative news outlets like BizPac Review.
Yet all of a sudden, after a year of mocking anybody with the guts to consider the theory, the media are now interested in offering their own dose of “serious reporting” on the matter. To critics, it seems like an arrogant slap in the face to the journalists who’d been willing to cover the theory from day one:
Note the sleight of hand here. Only the reporting now is “serious” by reporters who dismissed the theory to spite the orange man, not all the great reporting that happened originally that turned out to be right. The media are filled with egomaniacs. https://t.co/t8i5t1xR47
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) June 10, 2021
The obvious takeaway is the prior reporting on the Wuhan Lab was not serious – and, indeed, it was not. Even the Bezos Post is admitting this now. https://t.co/VeNlNYEZKX
— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) June 11, 2021
They did FAR more than this you dishonest clown. They said it was “this crazy, debunked conspiracy theory.” It was never debunked. It was never crazy. And it was never a conspiracy theory. You guys uttered 3 lies in a single 5-word phrase. That likely establishes a world record. https://t.co/l3ZGz3sYAl
— Joseph Toomey (@JosephEToomey) June 11, 2021
You turned out the lights yourself and then shot Democracy in the face.
Then you turned around and patted yourself on the back for saving us all.
— 𝓙𝓊𝓈𝓉 𝓪 𝓢𝒶𝓇𝒸𝒶𝓈𝓉𝒾𝒸 𝓔𝑔𝑔𝓇𝑜𝓁𝓁 (@Liberty_Eggroll) June 11, 2021
It’s like everything else msm does push the story they want first so everyone believes the lie then come back when no one’s looking and correct it meanwhile ppl telling truth get banned and silenced from the beginning it’s disgusting
— norman laflash (@nikkisoxx72) June 11, 2021
To critics, it’s also telling how the Post chose to refer to itself in the third person by citing “the media” instead of just using the word “we.”
Replace “the media” with “we” and you will be moving towards accurate reporting and accountability.
— David P Forsyth (@DavidPForsyth) June 10, 2021
The “media”??
You did pic.twitter.com/QpdDKV8gcK
— curiouscat (@curious_cat20) June 10, 2021
So what went wrong? Classically liberal journalist Matt Taibi believes fact-checkers used to be reliable but lost their way the moment they lost their humility.
Writing for SubStack, he recently noted that all “fact-checkers” do these days is serenade the public with “sanctimonious speeches about how reporters are intrepid seekers of truth who sit next to God and gobble amphetamines so they can stay awake all night defending democracy from ‘misinformation.'”
The problem, he added, is that too often, they themselves are the peddlers of misinformation.
“[O]nce you get past names, dates, and whether the sky that day was blue or cloudy, the worst kind of misinformation in journalism is to be too sure about anything. That’s especially when dealing with complex technical issues, and even more especially when official sources seem invested in eliminating discussion of alternative scenarios of those issues,” he explained.
In their certainty that Republicans were dead wrong about the lab leak theory, “fact-checkers” like Kessler became everything they purport to hate. And now that they’ve finally realized that they were wrong, they seem to want to just act like nothing ever happened. Except it did, and as noted below, an apology would be nice.
The Pravda WP was one of the media and tech cartels saying it was a conspiracy theory.
At what point do you apologize?
— Cortez-Smollett (@CortezSmollett) June 11, 2021
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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