@george-k said in Spiked:
A top editor at the New York Times instructed Times staffers not to investigate the origins of COVID-19, two Times employees confirmed today.
‘In early 2020,’ a veteran Times employee tells me, ‘I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].’
The global pandemic was then in its early stages. Donald Trump was running for reelection and calling SARS-CoV-2 the ‘Chinese virus’. His secretary of state Mike Pompeo had told ABC’s This Week in May 2020 that he had seen ‘significant’ and ‘enormous evidence’ of the virus originating in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A few weeks later, Sir Richard Dearlove, the ex-head of Britain’s MI6 spy service agreed: ‘I subscribe to the theory…that it’s an engineered escapee from the Wuhan Institute [of Virology].’
Yet the Times, according to two well-placed sources, refused to investigate the biggest story of our time. Instead, senior editors are alleged to have suppressed efforts to probe the virus’s origins, and the Times led the charge to dismiss any questioning of the WHO’s now-discredited line as conspiracist or even ‘racist’.
‘It was considered a conspiracy theory,’ confirms a second Times insider who was in a senior position on a different section at the time, and also proposed an investigation. ‘It was untouchable everywhere. The fact that Trump embraced it, of course, also made it a no-go.’
‘The idea was considered dangerous,’ my first source agreed. They suggest that the Times’s editors weren’t motivated by domestic politics in an election year, or even by a hatred of Donald Trump that ran so deep as to dispose them to trust the WHO and the Chinese government over the Trump administration.
Sounds about right.
But Fox does it too, dontchaknow.
