What They Got Wrong

I struggled with myself before posting on this editorial at the Wall Street Journal. On the one hand I agree with their premise and would even add one of my own. On the other hand I think they’re overstating the strength of their case.

Their premise is that most of the major media outlets are run by progressives who, shall we say, slant their coverage to get progressives elected and favor the policy goals of progressives which has led to their taking egregiously false positions on a number of significant stories over the last several years. Those outlets include to varying degrees of bias the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC.

My additional claim is that progressives tend to hold erroneous views of human nature which inevitably result in their favored policies producing bad results.

Here are the editors’ remarks on some stories that the media got wrong. My observations will follow.

• The Wuhan Virology Lab origin theory of Covid-19. In the early days of the pandemic, even raising this as a possibility was taboo. Sen. Cotton was vilified for doing so. The Lancet, a supposedly open-minded scientific journal, published a letter in February 2020 “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

This year we learned that the Lancet letter was part of a coordinated effort to quash the lab theory. We learned about the conflicts of interest of Anthony Fauci and others who provided funding for the Wuhan lab. Eventually even the press noticed that China had blocked an honest inquiry, and that no evidence for a natural origin has emerged.

• Lockdowns stop Covid-19. There was no fiercer consensus in the early days of the virus than the belief that locking down the economy to stop the virus was an unadulterated social good. We felt the consensus wrath when we raised doubts, in an editorial on March 20, 2020, about the harm that lockdowns would do to the economy and public health.

Two years later we now know that lockdowns at most delay the virus spread. The damage in lost education for children, lost livelihoods for workers and employers, and damage to mental health is obvious for all to see. Even Randi Weingarten, the teachers union chief who did so much to keep schools closed, now claims she wanted to keep them open all along.

• The supply side of the economy doesn’t matter. The Keynesian consensus, which dominates the U.S. and European media, has long held that the demand for goods and services drives the economy. The ability or incentive to supply those goods is largely ignored or dismissed. Spurring demand was the theory behind the trillions of dollars in spending by Congress and easy money from the Federal Reserve.

All that money did spur demand. But the Keynesians ignored the disincentives to increase supply from paying people not to work and restricting work with lockdowns and mandates. The result was the surging inflation that caught nearly all of them by surprise. Their demand-side models never saw it coming.

• The Steele dossier and Russia collusion narrative. In 2019 the Mueller report exposed the lack of evidence for the claims that Donald Trump and the Kremlin were in cahoots. This year the indictments by special counsel John Durham have revealed how Democrats and the press worked together to promote the dossier that was based on disinformation.

Yet for four years nearly everyone in the dominant media bought the collusion narrative. One or two of the gullible have apologized, but most want everyone to forget what they wrote or said at the time.

• Vilifying police won’t affect crime. The fast-congealing consensus after George Floyd’s murder was that most police were racist, as was most of American society, and violent protests against this were justified—even admirable. Woe to anyone who pointed out that the victims of these riots and crime were mostly poor and minority communities.

Police funding was cut and bail laws eased in many cities. Eighteen months later we see the result in rising crime rates and a soaring murder count. A political backlash now has even many Democrats claiming they really do want more funding for police.

Theory suggests that SARS-CoV-2 developed in an animal population and made the jump to infecting humans. At this point we’ll probably never know its true origins. My view is that there is already sufficient evidence that it spread via a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to prevail in a civil suit in the United States and that course of action should be pursued if for no other reason that it might energize the Chinese authorities to pursue and provide compelling evidence of an alternative theory.

Was there actually a fierce consensus that lockdowns were “an unadulterated social good”? I wish they had presented some evidence to that effect. My recollection was that it was a desperate move to slow the progress of the virus, taken with the understanding that it would also have adverse consequences. I think it would have been helpful if political leaders at the time had laid out their thinking in more detail and with more metrics. At least here in Illinois those were completely absent.

I think they misstate the “Keynesian consensus”. I also think that it is no more wrong than Newtonian mechanics is wrong, i.e. it’s just a special case. The underlying assumption is that an increase aggregate demand will impel an increase in aggregate supply. That’s the source of the “Keynesian multiplier”. I would say an increase in aggregate demand through borrowing is only benign to the extent that it does not exceed the increase in aggregate supply. IMO globalization throws everything into a cocked hat.

I thought the Steele dossier and the attendant Russia collusion narrative were pretty obviously the products of Clinton campaign oppo research but deserved investigation. I think that my more restrained approach has paid off. If not taking a highly confrontation stance with respect to Russia is being “in cahoots” with the Kremlin, most reasonable, well-informed people are.

I largely agree with their point about “vilifying the police”. Rather than going into hysterics about racism in police departments I think we’d be much better off devoting our energy to the problem of police officers taking an “us vs. them” attitude with “us” being police officers and “them” being everybody else. I also see a distinction between “vilifying the police” and taking a realistic attitude towards them.
I don’t deny that some police officers are racist; some are; some aren’t. One of the least racist, most progressive people I know (a college roommate) spent 30 years as a police officer. You learn a lot getting invited to cop parties.

I wouldn’t classify the stories they selected as the things the media got most egregiously wrong, either. I think that honor belong to its defense of the “1619 Project” which has been demonstrated to be a lie. A close second would be the role of CEI in the schools which IMO is extremely widespread and almost completely malignant.