User:Bakkster Man/COVID Media Sandbox

Section proposed for Investigations into the origin of COVID-19 article
An early hypothesis with the "lab" name on it came from James Lyons-Weiler, who said that he had “broken the coronavirus code” and found nucleotide sequences in its genome indicating that it had come from a laboratory working on coronavirus vaccines.

Media
U.S. media coverage of the lab leak hypothesis has shifted dramatically, going from giving little credence to it at first, to being much less skeptical about it. The shift occured around April 2021. Newspapers and media outlets initial opposition to the idea mimicked mainstream science, which at the time were very dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis.

The initial harsh reception of the theory by U.S. Media reflected political influences, and a desire to not contravene a campaign by researchers who were funded to study viruses who issued open letters labelling the lab leak hypothesis a "conspiracy theory".

Natasha Loder, Health policy editor of The Economist, said she thinks the US media was initially single-minded in their rejection of the lab leak theory and that it was for political reasons Paul Farhi, journalist from The Washington Post, went as far as to say that it was wrong for US Media to have said, early in the pandemic, that the lab leak theory was wrong

The New York Times is popular and known as a predominantly liberal medium with a sentiment close to that of the Democratic Party, whereas the Washington Post and Foreign Policy which was first founded by famed Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in 1970 and has been recently acquired by the Washington Post tend to be conservative in close proximity to the sentiment of the GOP. The WSJ, as a predominantly pro-business-finance journal, privileges the concerns of both middle-income and high-income consumers and finds itself welcomed by both the elites of the Democratic Party and the GOP and beyond.

Investigations themselves

 * The Wade article


 * Vanity Fair investigation

Assessments of investigations

 * SBM skepticism


 * Currently cited on Misinformation article regarding media change in tone


 * Amy Davidson Sorkin opinion piece on The New Yorker includes assesment of the WHO report as "not credible" among other useful bit of information

Other

 * WaPo timeline


 * Might be better elsewhere?


 * Australian reporter being used in echo chambers to create false ilussion of big story going on