Legacy Media Can't Handle Being Proven Wrong About COVID
We learned many, many things during the COVID-19 pandemic. Masks don't work, school closures are a disastrous failure, lockdowns and business closures harm millions while accomplishing nothing.
But the pandemic also re-established an all-important lesson: the experts are frequently wrong, censorship of dissenting ideas is indefensible, and the media will support left-wing consensus no matter what. Even in the post-pandemic period, that continues to be the case.
Especially because President Donald Trump made it a priority in his second administration to appoint individuals who were critical of Anthony Fauci and others who pushed COVID extremism. People like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, who spoke out against mandates and vaccine-related discrimination, among other policies.
The media demonstrated this week that it simply can't handle hearing it. Even though the political response has demonstrated that Bhattacharya and Makary's side, the side of objective reality, conclusively won out.
Jay Bhattacharya speaks during a rally where Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his Vice President representative as Nicole Shanahan at the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts in Oakland, Calif. (© Brittany Hosea-Small, Brittany Hosea-Small / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)
Legacy Media Continues To Struggle With Being Proven Wrong
The outcry from the media has focused on the fact that previous establishment scientists like head of NIH Francis Collins objected to Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration. Collins, infamously, described Bhattacharya and two other highly credentialed experts as "fringe epidemiologists."
And though Collins himself is not an epidemiologist, his words stuck with legacy media writers. Criticizing those within the establishment is not tolerated; Collins must be right, because his credentials and position within NIH made him right. Those criticizing him from the outside must be wrong, because they are on the outside. They've never been able to handle being shown that Collins, and by extension, their own work, was wrong.
Even worse, Collins, and the media, frequently demanded that outsiders like Bhattacharya be censored or have their reach limited. Dissent from whatever Collins, Fauci and their media partners said must not be tolerated. Now that the tables have turned, they quite simply can't handle it.
For example, The Atlantic, a frequent spreader of COVID misinformation from many of its authors, including David Frum, attacked Bhattacharya in an article this week, initially headlining their story that the "Fringe" is now in charge of the scientific establishment.
Why? Because Bhattacharya said that free speech should be encouraged in science.
"Science, to succeed, needs free speech," Bhattacharya said during his confirmation hearing. "It needs an environment where there’s tolerance to dissent."
Here's how the writer framed that obviously correct statement:
"This has long been his message—and warning—to the scientific community. In Bhattacharya’s view, Collins helped coordinate an effort to discredit his and others’ calls for an alternative approach to the pandemic; Collins’s role at an institution that disperses billions of dollars in research funding gave him a frightening power to ‘cast out heretics,’ as Bhattacharya put it in 2023, ‘just like the medieval Catholic Church did.’"
That's exactly what Collins did. And calling for "free speech" and "tolerance to dissent" is only a "warning" if politically motivated censorship has been the norm. As it has in the scientific community, where activism has taken over from unbiased research.
But The Atlantic wasn't done with its fear-mongering there.
"Now he means to use the same authority to rectify that wrong," they write. "In his opening remarks yesterday, Bhattacharya vowed to ‘create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully.’ What this means in practice isn’t yet clear, but The Wall Street Journal has reported that he might try to prioritize funding for universities that score high on to-be-determined measures of campus-wide ‘academic freedom.’ In other words, Bhattacharya may attempt to use the agency’s billion-dollar leverage in reverse, to bully academics into being tolerant."
"Bully academics into being tolerant?" Is it possible to have more inexcusable, dishonest framing than that?
It's not bullying to say that academia has abandoned its mission, that the scientific community has become exclusionary dictators instead of open-minded researchers. Not to mention that The Atlantic's Democratic Party has claimed to be defenders of "tolerance." Now that the right is demanding tolerance of different viewpoints though, it's become a dirty word.
It wasn't just Bhattacharya, The Atlantic also attacked Marty Makary for the crime of…being censored.
"Marty Makary, the nominee for FDA commissioner, has talked about his experience of the ‘censorship complex’ and bemoaned an atmosphere of ‘total intolerance’ in public health. Consensus thinking is oppressive, these men suggest. Alternative ideas, whatever those might be, have intrinsic value."
How does anyone type this sentence out after what we just experienced during COVID? The "alternative ideas" were conclusively proven correct. Lockdowns and masks did not work. This isn't even debatable, there is a right and wrong answer. The establishment was wrong. Alternative ideas were right. And for that, Makaray and Bhattacharya deserve to be demeaned and criticized for saying we should consider all viewpoints?
"Surely we can all agree that groupthink is a drag. But a curious pattern is emerging among the fringe-ocrats who are coming into power. Their dissenting views, strewn across the outskirts of conventional belief, appear to be curling toward a new and fringe consensus of its own," the article continues.
These are not serious people. The only way science progresses is to challenge conventional belief. But the modern left is so consumed by appeals to politically-aligned authority that it can't handle seeing its precious pals being proven wrong.
And it's obvious given how the writer continues by denying reality.
"Although there’s still plenty of reason to believe that the pandemic did, in fact, begin with the natural passage of the virus from an animal host, the most important details about the pandemic’s origin remain unknown," he says. "Yet the fringe is nearly settled on the alternative interpretation."
This is factually inaccurate. It is quite literally factually wrong. But because Fauci and the political left denied the lab leak in 2020, legacy media's never been able to let it go.
It's obvious how far on the "fringe" outlets like The Atlantic have now moved. During Bhattacharya's recent testimony as part of his confirmation process, virtually zero Democrats even tried to criticize his positions on COVID. Because he was so thoroughly proven right. He's no longer the "fringe," because Collins and Fauci were wrong. The Atlantic is the extremist view now, because its consensus was a disastrous failure. Still, Bhattacharya and Makary aren't calling for their bad ideas to be censored. Instead, they're advocating for the opposite approach from Collins and Fauci: tolerate dissent, even if it's wrong. And as a result, exposing The Atlantic and its partners as the censorious extremists they are.
Clearly, they're not handling it well.