by Jeff Childers
Last Sunday, the New York Times juxtaposed two remarkable op-eds on the same page, not accidentally, which were so astonishing it’s worth showing the actual pages from the print edition. The opinion pieces were respectively headlined, “Why Covid Probably Started in a Lab,” and “An Object Lesson on How to Destroy Public Trust.” Indeed.
That wasn’t all! The two op-eds featured their own full-length cover page:
Here’s that centered, supremely ironic headline, but a little bigger so you can read it clearly:
At first, I thought they must be joking. Can we finally have an honest conversation about covid? First of all, who has been stopping that honest conversation from happening? The New York Times, among others! And second, the headline clearly implies the previous conversations weren’t honest.
Who has been lying? I’ll let you answer that one.
The first author attempted to answer those questions. Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at M.I.T. and Harvard, and co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” blamed all the confusion on reflexive partisan politics:
Next, the Times’ mind-controlled readers finally read what we’ve been trying desperately to tell them for almost four years—science created this historic catastrophe:
Folks, it’s slow, but we are making progress. I could quibble about the specifics, and the narrative framing, but it was all there in the op-ed. Though Dr. Chan was careful to point the finger of blame back at the Chinese, Dr. Ralph Baric, the North Carolina researcher squatting at the middle of the controversy, was named five times. He was not blamed so much as used as undisclosed evidence of lab origin:
Though China took center stage, the piece didn’t quite let the U.S. completely off the hook either. Dr. Chan clearly connected U.S. funding and research priorities to the pandemic, and even (gently) called out the NIAID’s top human cockroach and beagle torturer, Fauci:
Remarkably, there was more in Dr. Chan’s piece that I agreed with than disagreed with (though she could have gone much further).
The connected companion op-ed about lost trust in science was authored by Princeton professor and regular Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci. It was equally honest — at least, as honest as we’ve yet seen in corporate media to date. Tufecki first blamed government officials as the ones who created the covid confusion, and she didn’t accept it was any accident:
Times readers may have ignored last week’s Congressional hearings, but now they’re reading about the low-lights. Things are heating up. Professor Tufekci outright rejected the pathetic official excuse that we didn’t know what we didn’t know, but did the best we could at the time. She called government officials (i.e., Fauci) arrogant and obstinate cowards:
Tufecki is no conspiracy-minded conservative. The Professor is an ardent pro-masker, a voluntary quarantiner, and a vaccine aficionado, admitting she “gleefully rolled up” her sleeve to get the shots. Gleefully.
So it was all the more remarkable that she echoed Coffee & Covid, decrying the pandemic’s “paternalistic, infantilizing government messaging” and calling, in her own way, for truth, transparency, and trust:
The 1,600 comments to Dr. Tufecki’s op-ed give great insight into the average Times reader’s stubborn mentality. Most commenters completely missed the point, making the elitist argument that, notwithstanding bad public messaging, they themselves always knew what was really going on, thanks to “serious” media like the Times.
Insert massive eye roll.
Here’s a typical example, a short exchange in the comments between an outraged commenter and the feisty Professor, who shot right back, comparing Atutu to an anti-vaxxer:
Professor Tupekci’s op-ed caused many commenters to bristle with barely concealed rage. They doggedly insisted that calling out the pandemic’s mistakes was unfair armchair quarterbacking, and was downright harmful to the narrative. Here’s one commenter, Elizabeth:
I included this taste of the comments because they highlighted the real problem, which is the zany zeitgeist or demonic spirit of the age. The fundamental trouble comes from the big group of folks who still believe, ipso facto, that government cannot ever err.
It is tempting to blame partisan politics, as Dr. Chan did. After all, it’s mostly leftists who’ve defensively circled the wagons around lying government officials. But politics is downstream from culture. What about personal health decisions could possibly be political?
In fact, before the pandemic, it was the left-leaning, crunchy granola folks who were always most likely to favor alternative medicines and employee rights. But the pandemic’s wrecking ball knocked normal politics askew, and now it’s all backwards and upside down.
If politics is downstream from culture, then to fix politics, we must first fix the culture. Even if fixing culture is vexingly difficult, the phenomenon is well known. In 1841, in his seminal book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” Charles Mackay famously noted, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
If covid isn’t an extraordinary popular delusion, then I am a spicy pepperoni Hot Pocket. For whatever reason, good or bad, limited hangout or genuine contrition, the New York Times seems to be slowly recovering its senses. And I’m counting that as progress.