Last week, Reagan administration Labor Secretary Ray Donovan — who was best known for saying, “Which office do I go to, to get my reputation back?” — passed away at the age of 90. Donovan made his famous quip after being acquitted on charges that he defrauded taxpayers, allegations that cost him his job, his business, and (thanks to the media) his good name. And if there’s anyone in politics who has the right to repeat Donovan’s statement today, it’s Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Sen. Cotton endured more than a year of media smears for daring to question the prevailing orthodoxy that the COVID-19 virus originated in a Chinese wet market, rather than the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Last January 30, he said that “Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.” He later urged the Chinese to “[o]pen up now to competent international scientists.”
We still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company.
I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/CtuU2czBLp
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) January 30, 2020
The media backlash was immediate, harsh, and unrelenting.
The New York Times (mis)informed its readers last February that Cotton’s “conspiracy theory lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists.”
Business Insider inveighed against Sen. Cotton with the ponderously long headline, “A GOP senator keeps pushing a thoroughly debunked theory that the Wuhan coronavirus is a leaked Chinese biological weapon gone wrong.”
Vox warned that, if the media did not quash Cotton’s words, “the conspiracy theory could persist and undermine trust in public health authorities at this critical moment.”
“Face the Nation” even gave China’s ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, a platform to accuse Cotton of instigating racial hate crimes against innocent Chinese Americans. “It’s very harmful, it’s very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people,” said Cui. “It will fan up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things that will really harm our joint efforts to combat the virus.”
Since Biden’s inauguration, however, the possibility of a lab origin has become mainstream, but the media have only taken baby-steps to set the record straight — and not to repair Cotton’s wrongly besmirched reputation, but to cover their own tracks. The Washington Post quietly edited a story from last February titled “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” The headline now reads, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.”
But note that the story retains its bias and does not improve its accuracy. Is a theory deemed credible by Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, a significant group of experts, and even WaPo’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler really “fringe?”
And a more concerning fact has come to light about the story: Rutgers University chemistry professor Richard Ebright says the same Washington Post article deliberately removed all his comments giving credence to the possibility that the coronavirus came from a lab.
“The experience — being quoted in the February 17 Washington Post article in a manner that materially misrepresented my views — was eye-opening,” Ebright wrote in an email to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “Watching ‘the first rough draft of history’ being written as a partisan exercise, rather than a journalistic exercise, was dismaying.”
Sen. Cotton believes the media went to such lengths to bury this theory about COVID-19’s origins, because “I was one of the first people to say it, and then President Trump said it, as well, and let’s just say most folks in the media don’t care for our politics. So, if it’s coming from us, they immediately want to discount it.”
The legacy media might be tempted to call that a conspiracy theory, as well — if not for the fact that so many journalists have admitted their anti-Republican bias caused them to spike the story for a year.
New York Times writer David Leonhardt confessed last month on CNN, “I think a lot of people on the political Left and a lot of people in the media made this mistake: They said, ‘Well, if Tom Cotton is saying something, it can’t be true.’ They assumed that, and that’s not right.”
Maggie Haberman of the New York Times claimed that Trump’s involvement made the story “instantly political.”
And NBC reporter Ken Dilanian said that the lab origin theory of COVID-19 “was dismissed at the time, because it was the Trump administration.”
“People like Tom Cotton were writing op-eds and going on TV just raising questions,” said Meghan McCain, and they “were treated like [they] were Alex Jones with a tinfoil hat.”
If the media won’t apologize, could Sen. Cotton at least be happy that they’ve finally given his views a fair hearing? Not necessarily. Cotton recently derided Biden’s efforts as “too little, too late,” predicting that the months of lost time and administrative inaction will prevent the United States from ever uncovering the real origins of the novel virus.
“I can bet what they’re going to find in 90 days. It’s exactly what they’ve found over the last 18 months: inconclusive evidence,” he said. “Because China has been concealing the evidence and probably has destroyed a lot of it.”
“That’s why it’s time to lower the boom on the Chinese Communist Party and to make them pay for what they have done to the United States and done to the world,” said Sen. Cotton late last month.
If the CCP must pay a price for delay, their allies in the media should, too.
So, where is the media’s collective mea culpa to Sen. Cotton? How long will he have to wait for the reporters who mocked him to admit he was ahead of the curve?
Ray Donovan gives us a good idea of how the media treat their victims. The New York Times, which pumped so much oxygen into the baseless charges that ruined his life, reported his death with the headline, “Raymond Donovan, 90, Dies; Labor Secretary Quit Under a Cloud.” Thirty-six years after Donovan left public life, the Times still can’t resist tarring him with discredited claims of wrongdoing. But as the truth continually comes to light thanks to news websites like this one, the only reputation the legacy media have destroyed is their own.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.