Report: Two New York Times Insiders Claim A "Top Editor" Deliberately Quashed Any Investigation Into the Origins of the Wuhan Virus

First, some background from Ashley Rindsberg reporting at Unherd:

In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as "racist". The question we have to ask now is how, and why, did this happen?

To a great extent, I believe the answer lies with the world's most powerful news outlet, the New York Times. At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP's strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper's markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump's travel ban to and from China as "isolationist". It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China's arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China's economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemic's origins. And it celebrated China's success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCP's absurd mortality numbers at face value, reporting in August 2020 that 4,634 Chinese people died from the virus and, six months later, that there were 4,636 total deaths. That in a country of 1.4 billion people only two people died of Covid-19 in the half a year defies logic and common sense. Still, the Times legitimised the CCP numbers by printing them as hard fact.

...

Over the months, the Times’s coverage grew even more strident --and more in line with Chinese propaganda. In February 2020, it gave a platform to zoologist Peter Daszak, publishing an opinion piece by him which claimed that the pandemic was caused by "road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development". Daszak argued that "discovering and sequencing" viruses like Covid-19 in labs like the one in Wuhan should be a priority.

The Times, which used Daszak as a key source in over a dozen articles, has never mentioned that Daszak's organisation funded the Wuhan lab, in particular research into bats and coronaviruses, a flagrant conflict of interest. Crucially, there was no mention of this when a reporter interviewed Daszak this February, following his return from a heavily criticised WHO investigation into the virus's origins. (Danszak later recused himself from the investigation because of the conflict of interest.)

But the Times also never revealed that Daszak was a favoured source for another outlet: China Daily. The state-owned media organisation, along with Xinhua and sister outlet Global Times, repeatedly quoted Daszak to assure readers of China's full cooperation in the search for the virus’s origins -- and to discredit the possibility of a lab leak.

In fact, the Times appears to have been so enthusiastic in its attempts to discredit the lab leak hypothesis that Chinese propaganda outlets promoted its reporting on social media. In April 2020, for instance, the Times published an article claiming the Trump Administration’s investigation into a lab leak "has echoes of the Bush administration’s 2002 push for assessments saying that Iraq had weapons of mass of destruction." Within minutes, a China Daily columnist retweeted the story and parroted its central claim.

The article goes on to note that not only does (or did) the New York Times take money from China to run a propaganda insert in the New York Times itself, but the New York Times also bragged about the lucrative publishing ventures it was launching in the Chinese market.

In other words: China had kompromat on the New York Times. And they in fact leveraged this kompromat to pressure the New York Times regarding reporting they considered anti-China, as the article notes.

Read the whole thing.

And now to the claim that a New York Times senior editor ordered that there be no investigation into the origins of covid-19, reported by Dominic Greene at SpectatorWorld.

A top editor at the New York Times instructed Times staffers not to investigate the origins of COVID-19, two Times employees confirmed today.

'In early 2020,' a veteran Times employee tells me, 'I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].'

[Even as evidence of a lab leak was building, the Times], according to two well-placed sources, refused to investigate the biggest story of our time. Instead, senior editors are alleged to have suppressed efforts to probe the virus's origins, and the Times led the charge to dismiss any questioning of the WHO’s now-discredited line as conspiracist or even 'racist'.

'It was considered a conspiracy theory,' confirms a second Times insider who was in a senior position on a different section at the time, and also proposed an investigation. 'It was untouchable everywhere. The fact that Trump embraced it, of course, also made it a no-go.'

'The idea was considered dangerous,' my first source agreed. They suggest that the Times's editors weren't motivated by domestic politics in an election year, or even by a hatred of Donald Trump that ran so deep as to dispose them to trust the WHO and the Chinese government over the Trump administration.

In the years before COVID-19, revenue from China was an integral part of the Times's business model....

In November 2019, it emerged that China Daily had failed to disclose to federal authorities millions of dollars in payments to US outlets including the Times and the Washington Post. In August 2020, the Times quietly scrubbed the China-funded advertorials from its website. Still, in October 2020, the Times ran an op-ed by Regina Ip, a member of Hong Kong's Executive Council, justifying the repression of anti-government protests in the Hong Kong SAR.

Tucker Carlson picks up on that little nugget that The New York Times deleted all the Chinese propaganda articles it ran -- paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, at a rate of $100,000 per month - soon after covid-19 broke out.

Almost as if they strongly suspected China created the virus, and they wanted to hide the evidence of their long-term collusion with the Chinese Communist Party.

He also recounts all the apparently-uncompensated propaganda on behalf of the CCP that the New York Times, CNN, and NBC/MSNBC ran.

As someone keeps saying -- I think Instapundit frequently repeats it, though I don't know if it's original to him -- the media is not covering up for China primarily to cover up for China, but to cover up for themselves and their long, traitorous history of collusion with the Communist Chinese Party.

posted by Ace at 12:17 PM

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