How Often Has the New York Times Been ‘Misled’? – WSJ:

Ms. Tufekci for her part was a mask enthusiast and by December of 2020 was still panicked enough about the virus to urge the postponement of Christmas gatherings. But that advice seems downright reasonable compared to the assault on free speech she was advocating in August of 2020. The Times itself profiled her in a piece called “How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right.” Ben Smith wrote:

The probable answer to a media environment that amplifies false reports and hate speech, she believes, is the return of functional governments, along with the birth of a new framework, however imperfect, that will hold the digital platforms responsible for what they host.

“It’s charmed that I get to do this, it feels good,” she said. “But in the ideal world, people like me are kind of superfluous, and we have these faceless nameless experts and bureaucrats who tell us: This is what you have to do.”

It’s so tempting to treat this as old news – five years old in this case – but the terrible impacts of government responses to the Great Chinese Lung Rot pandemic continue to haunt us in so many ways that when yet another member of the Inquisition of 2020 themselves confesses to error, it’s worth noting.

Note the use of the passive voice.

No NYT, you were not “misled”. You willingly bought in to all the bullshit sold to you by government officials about C-19 – its origin, lockdowns, social distancing, masks, vaccines and vaccine enforcement.

You completely and utterly failed in being a member of the vaunted 4th Estate who stand as the last wall against state tyranny. In fact you flipped that on its head and became the media enforcers of state policy by mocking, attacking and ultimately censoring anybody who spoke out against all this. Below is just one of many examples of the style of attack, this one courtesy of the piece-of-shit “fact-checker”, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post.

Now the NYT is trying to squirm out of this by blaming the scientific community:

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China….. now fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend [EcoHealth Alliance who were] planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world.

So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.

So the NYT just rolls with the “consensus” and stops asking questions, even of world class epidemiologists like the ones who were being attacked. The MSM are the sort of people who will regularly mention Galileo as an example of a scientist persecuted by his peers and the State because he didn’t buy into the “consensus”.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.

You know how you could have discovered this earlier, NYT? By interviewing the scientists being attacked. Pretty simple: it’s called reporting and it applies to much else that a simple blogger like me was able to find out at the time.

That whole “Has since emerged” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in that Times report. As early as April 2020, those “terrifyingly lax” protocols had already come to light. We also knew at the same time that the State Department had flagged the Wuhan Institute of Virology way back in 2018 for violating safety protocols required for the kind of gain-of-function research it was conducting. We also knew that The ScienceTM still had zero evidence for a natural zoonotic leap to humans to explain the outbreak epi-centered in the same town as the lab.

Of course it’s no longer the MSM that are not being listened to about healthcare (there’s a direct line between C-19 reporting and their failure to stop Trump in 2024):

MKH is right on the money; the NYT still has the same opinion about these “icky people” as they did back then. Buried in the middle of this mea culpa is evidence that they haven’t really changed (2024 election reporting as another example).

Unlike the Washington Post, the New York Times is unlikely to go broke, because unlike Bezos its various owners and controllers don’t care about the money but the Leftist messages it can send out as a propaganda platform.

Of course that starts failing when even your Lefty audience starts to get pissed off at being lied to, especially via an excuse-making-scapegoat effort, and simply leaves, as CNN and MSNBC are discovering with their 2017 repeat falling on deaf ears.