Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
The biggest error a considered, good-faith journalist typically makes is &quot;Presenting both sides&quot; without comment when one of them is an established consensus with abundant supporting evidence.  If you go looking for a fringe outside perspective on an issue, or the motivated reasoning of somebody who stands to gain by a bit of sophistry, you will probably eventually be able to find one presented by a PhD.  That is not how research is supposed to work.<p>The biggest error made in the COVID origin story has been the hilarious ineptitude and imprecision of the actual hypothesis being forwarded, something that appears even in this article&#x27;s metacommentary on the matter - all the various sorts of &quot;lab leaks&quot; that might have occurred are conflated, as if they were one idea that might be true or false.<p>As long as we are conflating all lab leaks, when I say an undetected contagion that happened to be on a bat they captured might have accidentally walked out of the lab in somebody&#x27;s nasal cavity, you are free to hear that China bioengineered a weapon and unleashed it on its own people in the interest of striking out at &#x27;Murica, demanding immediate geopolitical reprisals &amp; a violent purge of the Chinese-American population (something a significant fraction of the country was very receptive towards).<p>&quot;Lab Leak: True or false?&quot;  Both the same idea because we haven&#x27;t bothered to specify.  When a far-right politician does this it&#x27;s clearly to sell the population a villain and sell themselves as somebody who will take revenge, and then be able to motte and bailey themselves back to the other position when the center-right gets uncomfortable with the level of racism.  When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it&#x27;s a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.