Anatomy of a Taboo

T he media didn’t just get the story about the origins of Covid wrong. They tried to create and enforce a taboo against questioning the received wisdom on the matter.

It’s worth revisiting the building blocks of this taboo, since the same dynamic has been at play more widely, especially in coverage of other aspects of the pandemic response and climate change.

Rather than embracing an ethic of questioning everything — and especially authority — the legacy press in recent years has taken on the role of enforcer of various orthodoxies, whether based in fact or not.

The origins coverage is Exhibit A.

It was based on the following (and thank you to Drew Holden for his very helpful Twitter threads cataloguing the coverage):

Panic about Misinformation

Undergirding much of the coverage was a belief that misinformation, unless rigorously policed, could do terrible things . . . like get Donald Trump elected. Chris Cillizza accused Senator Tom Cotton of “playing a dangerous game with his coronavirus speculation,” noting that we are supposedly living in “a post-truth world” pushed by Donald Trump.

A New York Times story referred to the term “infodemic,” reportedly used by World Health Organization workers to denote the dangers of misinformation.

In this context, journalists clearly felt motivated to clamp down on anything that hadn’t received the official imprimatur as duly vetted and approved “information.” With this mindset, reporters were primed to dismiss dissidents and doubters and tilt toward declaring an unsettled question settled.

Scientists Say . . .

Relatedly, stories cited scientists and experts as though they all uniformly agreed that a lab leak was all but impossible. As an NPR headline put it, “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory of Pandemic Emergence.” It’s true that most scientists were saying this, so it would have required some initiative and open-mindedness to find and take seriously the dissenters. Instead, it was assumed that if one group of scientists said something, it must be true and unassailable.

It’s Been Found to Be ‘Unfounded’

The stories that didn’t outright call the lab-leak theory a “conspiracy theory” often used the words “unfounded” and “unsubstantiated” for it. Though technically true, this was obviously a way to suggest that it was outright wrong. In reality, of course, the naturally-occurring-virus theory was also unfounded and unsubstantiated — we don’t have hard evidence, either way — but the reporting lacked modesty about this.

Social Justice Must Be Heeded

It was assumed that people questioning whether the virus might have escaped from a lab had the worst of intentions; they were either stoking tensions with China or playing to racist sentiments. This provided an extra incentive to discount what they were saying — peace and social justice demanded nothing less.

If Trump Believes It Might Be True, It Must Be False

The press also viewed the question of Covid origins through an anti-Trump filter. Since he and officials in his administration considered a lab leak a possibility, it was assumed it must be blame-shifting or some sort of diversion. The New York Times managed to run a negative story about the administration asking intelligence agencies to look into the question. And, when the controversy was framed as Trump versus the Chinese lab, the Chinese lab, of course, got respectful and credulous coverage.

Any journalist who has been in the business for more than two weeks should know that people you dislike and distrust are sometimes correct, but the intensity of the contempt for Trump was a permission slip to forget that.

Over time, as some independent voices in the press gave the lab-leak theory a real hearing, the content and tone of the reporting changed. But the roots of the initial botched coverage remain, and they will drive the attempted creation of other taboos by a press that often wants not just to report information but to control it.