All tagged back2facts

‘Debunked’ no more: How the Wuhan lab theory got ‘uncanceled’

‘Debunked’ no more: How the Wuhan lab theory got ‘uncanceled’

Tatiana Prophet
National Security

For more than 15 months, the loudest voices on Earth worked very hard to distance Covid-19 from China’s only Level-4 Bio-Safety Lab in Wuhan. It turns out the actual distance between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the area’s “wet market” – where local authorities reported that the outbreak began -- is roughly 23 kilometers.

In fact, in spite of China christening the lab in 2017 to literally research the world’s most dangerous pathogens – including bat-derived coronaviruses like SARS-1 – the global media machine quickly tamped down any suggestion – from the few voices asking questions – that the lab might need to be investigated on the grounds of public health concern or that the virus had come from anywhere besides the wet market.

Georgia phone call: Washington Post admits their Trump quotes were wrong

Georgia phone call: Washington Post admits their Trump quotes were wrong

Tatiana Prophet
Anonymous Sources

Some of our readers who have followed this site from the beginning already know that we have discussed anonymous sources extensively — the right way and the wrong way to use them. When we say “right” and “wrong,” we mean “how not to look like an idiot eventually.”

In fact, The New York Times and Washington Post’s own guidelines caution against using unnamed sources more than very rarely. One of the biggest no-no’s is directly quoting the anonymous source, or further, using direct quotes allegedly by another person that were conveyed by a third party in the article because doing so could involve some embellishment or other distortion that may reflect someone’s vendetta.