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Comment by bumbada | Hacker News Reader

The NYT is extremely sectarian. They have been doing exactly what they now critizice for people in their right for a long time.

And it is impressive what we are seeing today with corona and Wuhan lab, all those media were basically calling lunatics to those that believed in the Wuhan lab hypothesis,licking the boots of their Chinese masters, now suddenly it is ok to believe that.

It is a huge problem for them, when looking back you can see clearly how much they were lying:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994

Since facebook and google bankrupted press media taking their Ads money, you basically can't trust them anymore, they sell themselves to the biggest bidder.

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I want to point out that Vox only labeled the edits and tweeted about it after they were caught red handed stealth editing their deception.

The other "usual suspects" were all attacking lab leak theory in 2020, including CNN, Washington Post and the NYT.

Washington Post's chief fact checker called it "debunked".

These people are quite literally controlling the flow of information, given their secret contracts with Facebook and their influence on Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.

Corporate media needs to die before they get more people killed (NYT lied about WMDs in Iraq and thousands of innocent people died, nobody was fired).

I think the situation is far more dire. The same types of political ideologues are taking over FAANG and other tech spaces, and other information outlets, like Wikipedia, where only "approved" or "authoritative" sources are typically accepted.

Corporate and social culture have been hijacked by a sort of soft, insidious, growing authoritarianism and the consequences for the future of the west are severe, especially because these newly dominant voices are increasingly openly hostile to the ≈50% of the population whom they are effectively disenfranchising. Even fundraising for controversial figures who have anything remotely in common with right of center ideology is impossible between the fundraising sites and credit card companies. Something's got to give and it won't be pretty for anyone.

Considering the Overton window, the argument could be made that today's "right of center" would have been considered dangerously extremist by the right a few decades ago, and that growing extremism is causing previously right leaning groups to apear to "change sides" and "ganging up" when they're not actually changing their stances at all, they're reacting to what they perceive as growing extremism. When a minority group gets more extreme, it appears to people in that group that everyone else is moving away, when in reality, it's them that are actually shifting beliefs.

> today's "right of center" would have been considered dangerously extremist by the right a few decades ago

Extremist in what, supporting LGBTQ?

I don't think so. A decade ago was the tea party, that was effectively a Libertarian action by Democrats and Republicans. Libertarian being very "right of center" and combined support indicates some level of popularity. In my experience as formerly labeling myself Libertarian was the only shitty time to be one was around elections because Democrats and Republicans like to blame their failings on you.

How the lab leak theory was handled by the media was definitely botched, but at the time the full theory that I saw thrown around was more than an accidental leak. It also included items like purposely engineered to attack the west, and even included purposely releasing in order to attack Trump which afaik there has been zero evidence.

You shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water though. The existence of outlandish claims should not render all unsupported claims invalid. Even if those outlandish claims manage to garner the support of the masses.

I agree, which is why I said the coverage was botched. But even the person I originally responded to said the 'Wuhan lab hypothesis'. Which hypothesis? I thought an accidental lab leak always seemed like valid avenue to explore (my version of the hypothesis), but depending on who you say hypothesis to it means different things.

I think the whole situation highlights the challenges with communication in such a hyper us/them environment with the memeification of out of context quotes. The later is also commonly seen with experts who say something like "you don't need to do X, unless A, B, C occurs." The only thing shown to the masses is "You don't need to do X".

It seems like that association was engineered. The question went something like "did the virus leak from the WIV?" to which the mass media responded "no, the virus was not man-made!"

There were multiple theories of various levels of conspiracy thinking.

The 'deliberately released bioweapon' stance was niche by niche standards. It had a vocal base, and some initial inertia in January due to the HK protests. But the 'accidental lab leak' hypothesis always made more sense.

It was the weakest version of the argument, and the existence of that bathwater in need of being tossed hardly necessitated defenestrating the clean baby lying next to the tub.

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