A New York Times news article about a policy agenda drafted by moderate House Democrats includes this passage:
One measure included in the agenda appears to accept the Republican talking point that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory in China, then covered up by the World Health Organization — assertions that have been challenged repeatedly by scientific researchers.
The Never Again International Outbreak Prevention Act, by Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Conor Lamb, a centrist Democrat running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, "would provide accountability with respect to international reporting and monitoring of outbreaks of novel viruses and diseases, sanction bad actors and review the actions of the World Health Organization."
Saying that an assertion "has been challenged by scientific researchers" or that something is a "Republican talking point" is a different thing than saying it isn't true. Instead of using the weasel word "appears," the Times could have looked at the actual legislation, which was initially introduced in June 2020. The text of the legislation says the "The Permanent United States Representative to the United Nations shall use the voice, vote, and influence of the United States to seek the adoption in the United Nations General Assembly or Security Council of a resolution to ban wet markets," a step that suggests the wet market theory of covid origin rather than the lab leak theory. The bill does call for "an audit of the World Health Organization relating to its actions in response to COVID–19," but that is a different thing from accepting a talking point about a cover up.
Anyway, language like this in a news article in the New York Times is the sort of thing that causes a lot of readers to question the paper's objectivity. The tone is off. It sounds like the Times is playing partisan defense for the Democratic left, or for the Chinese Communist Party, rather than participating in an open-minded, genuinely curious inquiry into the pandemic's origins. The Times article appears to accept the Chinese Communist talking points, is the way the Times might put it. Other, earlier Times coverage has sporadically been more open to acknowledging faults in both the WHO response and the Chinese Communist Party's initial actions, to accept uncertainty about the pandemic's origins, and to acknowledge that the Chinese authorities botched the early response and were less than fully transparent in disclosing information about early patients and what ties, if any, they had to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Were those New York Times articles also just Republican talking points?
The Times article carries the byline of Jonathan Weisman, a Times journalist that the newspaper publicly faulted in 2019 for having "repeatedly displayed poor judgment on social media and in responding to criticism." It's one thing to publicly fault Weisman for having "repeatedly displayed poor judgment"; it's another thing for the Times editors to keep him around and fail to supervise him closely enough to prevent nonsense like this in the news columns.
For an alternative view, check out the Substack newsletter by former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles, edited by former New York Times editor and writer Bari Weiss. Bowles writes:
The British government now considers the idea that Covid originated in a lab to be the most likely explanation, according to a new report from The Telegraph: "On Monday, the Prime Minister told the House of Commons that the UK biosecurity strategy would be refreshed to protect against 'natural zoonosis and laboratory leaks,' in a public acknowledgement of the threat from insecure research facilities."
The denial of the lab leak has been one of the most persistent bits of illogic from some quarters on the American left.