The New York Times plays catchup on Covid-19 origins, but still has a long way to go.
The Times, which has fallen behind almost all other media in providing accurate and balanced coverage of pandemic origins, finally comes up with something good. Here's what they need to do next.
Let’s start with the good news, because there is a fair bit of it. After more than three years of failing to do comprehensive and balanced coverage of the very real scientific debate over how and where the Covid-19 pandemic began, the New York Times is starting to play catch up. The new developments have been slow in coming, and intermittent, with one step backwards for every two steps forward. But we do, finally, seem to be past the days when Times reporters could get away with calling a lab or research-related origin for the SARS-CoV-2 virus “dangerous” or “racist,” as some of its leading science writers were doing well more than a year after the pandemic started in Wuhan, China.
Signs of what might be called a slow-turning pivot emerged after Congressional hearings into Covid-19 origins began in Washington, D.C. Congressional hearings are hard to ignore, even when Republicans are leading them and even when most mainstream media are liberal-leaning in political outlook. To cover them, the Times assigned Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a D.C.-based health policy reporter who has been with the paper more than 20 years, and who—this is the good part—had few preconceived notions or biases. As a result, Stolberg has produced some good stories, including this explainer about the Covid origins debate (together with reporter Ben Mueller, whose past coverage has left a lot to be desired in my opinion) which was more balanced than most anything the Times had done before.
(I made some comments on Ben Mueller’s Covid-19 origins coverage, especially his very skewed reporting on the recent raccoon dog DNA controversy, in this recent piece for Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists; see also my commentary on the raccoon dog saga for “Words for the Wise.”)
But the most encouraging development in the evolution of the Times’s coverage came this past weekend, when the paper published a long report entitled “Chinese Censorship is Quietly Rewriting the Covid-19 Story.” At least as notable as the story itself was the identity of its lead writer: Mara Hvistendahl, a former colleague of mine at Science magazine, and, more importantly, a former contributor to The Intercept who helped break some of its most important stories on Covid-19 origins.
When we were together at Science, about a decade ago, I was the journal’s Paris correspondent and Mara was reporting from China. I got to meet her in person once, at a get-together of Science’s international correspondents in Cambridge, U.K.. She was as sharp and intelligent in person as her coverage of China’s science politics was on the page. The Times hired Mara recently to do Asia coverage, a very smart move on their part.
For The Intercept, together with science journalist Sharon Lerner and other reporters, Mara broke a number of stories about the risky pathogen research being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some of that research, including unmistakable gain-of-function experiments with human pathogens, was funded by NIH funds funneled through the non-profit organization EcoHealth Alliance. Indeed, a lot of what we know about that subject—so critical to evaluating competing hypotheses for the pandemic’s origins—comes from the reporting of Mara and her colleagues.
In her latest story for the Times, written and reported together with Ben Mueller, Mara tells a sordid tale of censorship and suppression of information by Chinese officials in the early days of the pandemic, aided and abetted by WHO and Western journal editors. Here are a couple of “nut grafs” from the story, which should give you the gist:
“That the Chinese government muzzled scientists, hindered international investigations and censored online discussion of the pandemic is well documented. But Beijing’s stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found.
Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found.”
While the story goes over a lot of ground that has been covered by other reporters, much of it will be new to Times readers. And there are a number of new elements that could only come from the kind of digging the Times should have been doing all this time. Among them was a deep dive into the retracted papers, with the help of data from the group Retraction Watch:
“Soon, Chinese researchers were asking journals to retract their work. Journals can withdraw papers for a number of legitimate reasons, like flawed data. But a review of more than a dozen retracted papers from China shows a pattern of revising or suppressing research on early cases, conditions for medical workers and how widely the virus had spread — topics that could make the government look bad. The retracted papers reviewed by The Times had been flagged by Retraction Watch, a group that tracks withdrawn research.”
How could this happen? Mara and Ben quote Retraction Watch founder Ivan Oransky, and it’s not a flattering portrait of the integrity, or lack of it, of some journal editors:
“Journals are typically slow to retract papers, even when they are shown to be fraudulent or unethical. But in China, the calculus is different, said Ivan Oransky, a founder of Retraction Watch. Journals that want to sell subscriptions in China or publish Chinese research often bend to the government’s demands. ‘Scientific publishers have really gone out of their way to placate the censorship requests,’ he said.”
There’s a lot more in the piece, and I would urge you to read it if you have not already. But the Times still has a long way to go to catch up on the origins story. That doesn’t mean that the paper should now start leaning towards a lab origin for the pandemic’s origins, after three years of pitching hard in the direction of the zoonotic spillover hypothesis despite a lack of direct evidence for either scenario. But it does mean digging into the subject, doing real investigations like this one, instead of simply quoting scientists (sometimes on only one side of the issue) and doing no real reporting, as has been the case until very recently.
Why the pivot, if that is really what is happening? There’s an old joke in journalism, where a reporter goes to their editor and tries to pitch a hot story, a big scoop. “If it’s as hot as you say, why isn’t it in the New York Times,?” the editor asks. In reality, the Times is often behind the stories broken by other reporters, including independent journalists. But no major paper can get away with that forever, because readers will go elsewhere for their news (as many did long ago on the Covid origins story.)
(I have joked on social media that within a year we might be seeing “How Did We Get It Wrong?” think pieces in the Times, and I am only half-kidding.)
I hope that this weekend’s investigation is just the first of a series of stories that Mara will be assigned to report on, although that seems far from certain given her other responsibilities on the Asia beat. There are lots of things to look into. One major weakness of the current story is that there was no discussion at all of how the Chinese coverup efforts affect estimates of the likelihoods of the two leading hypotheses for Covid-19 origins.
For example, there was no mention of the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has refused to report on what it did with NIH funds, which led the agency to cut off the institute (a very important decision that the Times failed to cover, along with almost all of the mainstream media.) The focus on what evidence China might be hiding from the Huanan Seafood Market, with little mention of the risky pathogen research the WIV was doing, has been a source of bias in a lot of recent commentary.
Also, no discussion of missing or suppressed data is complete without reference to the work of Gilles Demaneuf, a data analyst and member of the independent investigative group DRASTIC, whose research into dozens of Covid-19 cases not reported by China to WHO was featured last November in the Washington Post. And while the Times article quoted French researcher Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo about the missing data, the story failed to mention that she is one of a number of scientists who have challenged the findings of two papers in Science last year—which the Times hyped as “breaking news” when they were still being peer reviewed—which concluded that the zoonotic spillover hypothesis was most likely.
Indeed, despite the publication now of four peer-reviewed papers challenging those highly mediatized findings—along with several other preprints working their way through the peer-review process—the Times and most other mainstream media have only reported on one.
There is a lot else the Times and other mainstream media outlets have not reported on, and one can hope—for example, as the analyses of the intelligence agencies are declassified and published—that they will begin serving their readers with more accurate and balanced coverage going forward.
One thing does seem more likely than ever: The days when actual scientists are able to get away with toxic trolling on social media, calling anyone who suggests a lab origin might be possible a “conspiracy theorist,” may be coming to an end.
