Yascha Mounk
For much of the pandemic, mainstream publications confidently rejected the possibility that an inadvertent lab leak may stand at the origin of Covid. The New York Times and The Washington Post, The Guardian and Vox all referred to this notion as a “conspiracy theory.” Fact-checkers at Politifact and other leading outfits claimed that the idea had definitively been “debunked.” Renowned scientists were banned from Facebook and YouTube for dissenting from the approved line.
Then, in the course of a few weeks, the theory suddenly stopped being taboo. The evidence that there was reason to take the theory seriously had gradually accumulated on social media. Finally, in January 2021, a major article in New York Magazine marshaled some of the strongest evidence for the theory. Though it did not contain much new information, serious consideration of the topic started to appear in all the most prestigious outlets over the following days and weeks. Before long, the theory was routinely being described as a plausible, and perhaps even likely, explanation for the start of the pandemic.1
The media’s change in how it covered the origins of the pandemic is one of the most extreme examples of groupthink in recent history. But it is far from the only case in which journalistic coverage of an important topic has radically shifted over the course of a stunningly brief span of time.
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