Media bias: MSNBC reporter says no credence given to China lab theory because it came from ‘the right’

A reporter from MSNBC said the quiet part out loud on social media this week: Journalists like him and “people” didn’t give the “China lab Covid theory” credence because it came from conservatives, or as he calls them, “right with ‘Chinese bio weapon’ conspiracies” and “right with anti-Fauci conspiracies.”

MSNBC reporter Mehdi Hasan, who is British-American, then concluded: “Blame the conspiracy theorists.”

The admission that news was biased against conservative perspectives on Covid was in response to a Twitter comment by poll analyst Nate Silver, who said that scientists who suppressed discussion of the origins of the Covid-19 virus should be embarrassed.

“The reason this drives me up the wall is that if you’re ever going to pretend that ‘misinformation’ is a useful category, at least acknowledge it was a massive error to label lab leak discussion as ‘misinformation’ when multiple US government agencies now put the chances ≥50%,” Silver said.

“It’s hard to have a good faith disagreement about a major issue if the issue itself has been hijacked by bad faith folks,” Hasan said.

The back-and-forth between the two major media conversation-shapers comes at a time when there has been more public reflection about the suppression of free speech during the pandemic, and what that means for the public’s trust in their government.

In November, as Dr. Anthony Fauci was retiring from government service as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and top Covid advisor to presidents, pleaded with the public, “The people who have correct information, who take science seriously, who don’t have strange, way-out theories about things but who base what they say on evidence and data, need to speak up more because the other side that just keeps putting out misinformation and disinformation seems to be tireless in that effort.”

But it was reporter Hasan who observed that the reluctance to give any credence to Covid origin theories was based in partisan politics.

“Also: ask yourself why so many people on the right, lay people, were obsessed with this one specific aspect of the science of Covid, which by the view is still not the majority view amongst scientists? Was it because of their scientific curiosity? Lol,” Hasan wrote.

Fauci said this week, in response to the news that the Department of Energy has changed its position and now thinks the lab-leak theory is most likely correct, that there is no evidence to support the lab-leak theory.

Fauci is not being completely forthright. In 2021, the National Institutes of Health was discovered to have been the funder of gain-of-function coronavirus research studies at a Chinese lab in Wuhan. Fauci denied the allegations, but the NIH admitted that it indeed funded those studies. Dr. Fauci’s wife, Dr. Christine Grady is chief of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH Clinical Center.

A scientific study published in October of 2020 supports the idea that news media used a political filter to decide what to cover regarding the pandemic. The study’s abstract says, “Using multiple computer-assisted content analytic approaches, we find that newspaper coverage is highly politicized, network news coverage somewhat less so, and both newspaper and network news coverage are highly polarized. We find that politicians appear in newspaper coverage more frequently than scientists, whereas politicians and scientists are more equally featured in network news. We suggest that the high degree of politicization and polarization in initial COVID-19 coverage may have contributed to polarization in U.S. COVID-19 attitudes.”

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