Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

There's a lot of valid criticism to be had, but the alternative of "doing your own research"* is a little bit facile.

Real people who are actually engaged in the business of participating in society--holding down jobs, going to school, being citizens--don't have the time to effectively "research" every important issue, and, as a corollary, those who do tend to be cranks.

For sure nobody should engage in "uncritical acceptance", though to me this seems like a straw man. The test of a good newspaper isn't whether you can read it uncritically, but whether reading it critically leaves you more or less well informed.

* A distinctive phraseology which, as detailed in "Pale Horse Rider" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQS4DYQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...), goes back to at least William Cooper and the 1990s, but has recently come to be used for things like vaccine skepticism and QAnon.

This is why I switched to "unlimited" data via Mint mobile.

It's enough of a connection to satisfy the small amount of internet that I still use.

The downside is that if I torrent a lot of files I can theoretically reach the 30 GB limit.

Ok, stubs a stub, fair enough. Here is a more substantive criticism:

In this article the author engages in a smear of the anthropogenic conjecture and of Sen Cotton by associations invented by the article itself. It may as well as ask "when did you stop beating your wife" as much as "when did Sen Cotton stop saying coronavirus was a bioweapon."

Truthfully the article never establishes that Sen Cotton claimed that coronavirus was a bioweapon. However, the author does take pain to characterize later statements as "Mr. Cotton later walked back the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon run amok." How does one walk back a statement that was never made?

I went back and listened to YouTube clips of Cotton during the time period [0, 1, 2 among them] and consistently I hear a person saying that coronavirus is bad, travel restrictions and quarantines are needed, and that the Chinese government is lying about the severity, chronology and origin of the disease. I didn't hear him making a claim of bioweapon.

I depended on YouTube's search function and then Cotton's own media appearance list for videos before the article's date of 2/18/2020 so maybe there was some other source where Cotton made a bioweapon claim that could be walked back? I visited Wikipedia's helpful COVID-19 Misinformation page and didn't find anything about Cotton [3]. I then checked Archive org for the same page from the NYT's article's time period and found a few mentions of Cotton [4]. Here were contemporaneous articles from a publication called "The Hill" from 2/2/2020 [5], CNN from 2/18/2020 [6], and Snopes (which excludes archive.org) of 4/1/2020 [7].

The Hill's mention of Cotton comes by way of the Chinese ambassador on a television show "Face The Nation:" Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai criticized Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday for suggesting the coronavirus could have been created in a Chinese biological warfare lab. That is the entirety of it. No link to what Cotton said or didn't say. In the Face The Nation transcript [8], Amb Cui doesn't claim Cotton said that. It's the interviewer that brings up Cotton claiming "And in fact, this week, Senator Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, suggested that the virus may have come from China's biological warfare program." Ok, so the Cotton statement must have been before 2/2/2020? Bookmark that for a moment.

CNN's article focuses on Cotton coming "under fire" for his statements about coronavirus. On Fox News Sunday morning, Cotton suggested the virus did not originate in an animal market as the Chinese government has claimed, but perhaps from another source, such as an infectious disease research lab nearby. While acknowledging there's no evidence the disease originated there, Cotton questioned the validity of China's statements, saying "China was lying from the beginning, and they're still lying today." At no point is Cotton quoted or documented in any way as claiming coronavirus is a bioweapon.

Snopes' writes It is speculative, however, to assert, as U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton did, that these actions were done to cover up a leak from a lab. citing the NYT article, completing the ourobouros of misinformation.

Back to Cotton from before 2/2/2020. Before 2/2 Cotton appears to be trying to raise the alert for coronavirus and advocating for travel controls (and includes exception for Americans, medics and disease researchers) and quarantines. [9, 10, 11]. Again, I don't hear anything about biowarfare.

CNN does link to a 2/16/2020 tweet [12] from the @SenTomCotton account in response to a Washington Post article [13]. The tweet is Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: and subsequent tweets delve into each hypo.

CNN also does quote Cotton with his rationale for speaking out about the wet market claim for the origins of coronavirus "Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China who have published a study in the international journal The Lancet have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market," Cotton said. "The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market."

Let no organization be entirely judged by its worst moments or by uncharacteristic best ones or by the actions of any single worker within it. I had expected to be quickly gratified by some Arkansas senator whose mouth went further than the facts. At the same time I remember Gell-Mann Amnesia [14] enough to not take one article's word for the facts. When I saw the heaps of other articles repeating and expanding on the NYT, I see unshadowed disinformation in action, an echochamber of bullshit.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7roTUfd35w

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT3txmbWxb4

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytGIkcCh7T8

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation

4. https://web.archive.org/web/20200715000000*/https://en.wikip...

5. https://web.archive.org/web/20200804003739/https://thehill.c...

6. https://web.archive.org/web/20210308045325/https://web.archi...

7. https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

8. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-cui-tiankai-on-face-...

9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT3txmbWxb4

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBsPh1Rq0Fw

11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjWm2GnuDn8

12. https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126?...

13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

14. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

15. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...

16. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> A better alternative is not trusting any of them. Realize that they're all distorting the truth, and yet also sharing a part of the truth, and dig deeper.

I think that's kinda right, but I have some quibbles. Basically, I feel the attitude that they're not trustworthy and distorting the truth leads to a kind of paranoia, feelings of helplessness, or succumbing to the trap letting an uncritical indulgence of one's own biases dictate what's "factual." I think there's a better way to say a similar thing:

You can trust the members if the mainstream media to try their best, but realize they make mistakes for understandable reasons and have their own biases, so you need to read with those biases in mind and try to correct for them with a measure of skepticism (e.g. a grain of salt, not a boulder). Realize that they're all sharing a part of the truth, dig deeper, and withhold judgement. The news is a first draft of history, written before all the facts are in.