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Comment by nateberkopec | Hacker News Reader

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives

I remember seeing Twitter chatter from the right re: the Fauci email dump, and so I went on various liberal outlets to try to get the left-wing perspective, and it was complete crickets.

Especially when it's something I can't just read and form an opinion on myself (Fauci's email dump was absolutely massive), I depend on journalists to accurately summarize and contextualize primary sources. And it's really hard to get a straight take when one side won't even bother to write a "this is a nothingburger, here's why" article.

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From someone else's link, this Tangle site seems pretty solid. Specifically on Fauci's emails:

https://www.readtangle.com/p/dr-anthony-fauci-emails-coronav...

Thanks! I was looking for a summary as well from someone who understands that their take is just THEIR take. I find it funny that it seems like the most objective people are those that confront their subjectivity. And Isaac Saul seems to do it well here.

Just read that and...there's nothing. Fauci's one of the most prominent people on the planet, dealing with one of the worst pandemics in recent human history, so I'd honestly expect his emails to contain way more interesting stuff than what the Tangle pulled out. If that's all there is, no wonder it's crickets from everybody except the right, who have an obvious interest in discrediting Fauci and a notable disinclination to give a shit about facts.

Was it massive? My impression was that it was exactly what you'd expect - basically a nothingburger, a few interesting tidbits, most of the sensational stuff was taken out of context and/or already known and/or flatly misrepresented.

What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?

I'm not even sure if its true since most media will barely engage with the issue. But Fauci appeared concerned that Covid-19 could potentially be the result of a gain-of-function research that artificially evolved another COVID strain to increase its effectiveness at spreading.

If true, COVID-19 is the biggest scientific fuck up of all time. Fauci had allegedly pushed to resume funding that sort of research.

Instead, the powers that be sort of dismissed it as a conspiracy theory for over a year until it was suddenly okay to talk about a few months ago.

Again, I can't even tell if any of that is true because most media outlets ignored it.

This should be trivially easy for proponents of that theory to prove it if that is in his emails. Just link to an un-edited, full context email thread relevant to that topic.

So does this exist? If so, just share that link. If not, stop pretending that "media bias" is an excuse to continue sharing the claim surrounded by unfounded conspiracy thinking.

> full context email thread

Nobody who is dumb enough to let such a thing come into existence in the first place winds up with a career arc that takes them through a position of substantial authority at the federal level.

Politicians may be evil but they're not dumb.

These people here in this topic are the vectors for misinformation.

>Thanks for sharing. Yes, I saw this earlier today and both Eddie and myself are actually quoted in it. It's a great article, but the problem is that our phylogenetic analyses aren't able to answer whether the sequences are unusual at individual residues, except if they are completely off. On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1 ) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.

>We have a good team lined up to look very critically at this, so we should know much more at the end of the weekend. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change

Page 3187: https://www.scribd.com/document/510220252/Fauci-Emails#from_...

HN formatting is primitive, but the relevant sentence is "Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."

Notice how when you present the facts, people get really quiet. No, "Wow, I checked out the source and you appear to be right. I'm going to have to re-think these issues."

So much for intellectual integrity.

The other relevant sentences are the rest of them.

Like "But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change"

He basically, said "Eh, maybe, but we really need to look harder".

Having worked at a media outlet, it's not particularly credible that they "ignored" it. Maybe some of them did.

But if the Washington Post and Buzzfeed (who are also, uh, media sources themselves) FOIA'ed 3200 pages of Fauci emails, there's a zero percent chance - zero - that someone from a bunch of orgs didn't at least take a look.

The reason it looks like they "ignored" it is because they didn't see a story to report. Which is how the process should work.

So if there were a Fauci email saying, "Yeah, we probably created covid, whoops" there's a zero percent chance you wouldn't see at least someone linking to the email in question. Do you see those links? There you go.

"And it's really hard to get a straight take when one side won't even bother to write a "this is a nothingburger, here's why" article. "

Gets tiring responding to the rights lies.

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