Media watch: The Times Cozied Up to the CCP
“The world’s verdict on the lab leak seems to be shifting,” notes Ashley Rindsberg at UnHerd — but let’s not forget who stifled debate: The New York Times “set the news and policy agenda on the lab-leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it” — “while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets” and “pursuing long-term investments in China.” The Gray Lady echoed Communist Party talking points at the pandemic’s start, “taking the CCP’s absurd mortality numbers at face value.” And it “ignored the unparalleled success of China’s archenemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus” and “downplayed China’s economic war against Australia” after its prime minister “questioned” Beijing’s “story on the pandemic’s origins.” Months later, the paper “abruptly ended its advertising relationship with Chinese state media outlets and scrubbed all trace of” hundreds of “advertorials from its archive.” That doesn’t “excuse the paper’s” earlier coverage, which might have “delayed” a verdict on the lab-leak theory.
Physician: CDC’s Stupid Panic
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have again changed their tune, now saying fully vaccinated folks “should wear a mask in public indoor settings” in areas of high transmission — despite “little in the data to support this reversal,” Dr. Joel Zinberg fumes at City Journal. The CDC says the Delta variant of COVID-19 can be spread from the vaccinated to others. Therefore, “masking vaccinated people” will “protect” everyone. “But the agency never quantifies either the risks of breakthrough infections and secondary transmission or the benefits of masking.” Plus, the “small and somewhat contradictory studies” the CDC is using for its mask guidance is “like a slim reed on which to base a nationwide change in policy.” Bottom line: “After a year and a half of sacrifice, the American public deserves . . . evidence-based policy.”
Iconoclast: We Have To Move On
“Let it rip,” declares Andrew Sullivan at his Substack, reflecting on the experience of gay, vaccinated friends who contracted the virus in Provincetown, Mass. — but didn’t get more than a little sick. “Do we really want to get back to living? I do. So take the rational precautions — a solid vaccine — and go about your business as you always did. Yes, I’ll wear a mask indoors if I’m legally required or politely asked. But I don’t really see why anyone should. In a free society, once everyone has access to a vaccine that overwhelmingly prevents serious sickness and death, there is no reason to enforce lockdowns again, or mask mandates, or social distancing any longer. In fact, there’s every reason not to.”
From the right: Wokeness Masks Incompetence
“Mass hysterias” can paralyze “stable societies,” but Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness suspects that “wokeism” also serves to “hide preexisting incompetence.” Mayor Michael Bloomberg failed to clear snow quickly in New York City but “lectured” about global warming and “super-sized soft drinks.” American Airlines CEO Doug Parker denounces a Texas voting law, but a recent American flight had to divert 180 miles to refuel. Hollywood’s mega-stars join the Twitter outrage chorus “almost daily,” but “the real travesty is that Hollywood simply makes poor movies.” Universities and even the military face similar problems. It’s a warning to our institutions: “Either their abilities to carry out their assigned tasks are becoming diminished” by wokeism, or “they are using ideological camouflage simply to mask their unaccountability — and their increasing incompetence.”
Culture critic: Laissez-Faire Won’t Beat CRT
At Spectator World, Daniel McCarthy wonders if the right can use the public’s revulsion at “race indoctrination” to defeat it. The trouble is that “a large proportion of the Republican elite and upper echelons of movement conservatism merely want a milder version of the prevailing progressive culture. . . . What these comfortable conservatives are aiming for is a live-and-let-live cultural federalism.” But that underestimates how “progressives fight for the culture by the rules of war, combining propaganda and political power with economic superiority.” The right might be interested in cultural laissez-faire — the left isn’t.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board