tippinsights Editorial Board, TIPP Insights
Few stories have been as impactful after 9/11 as the media coverage of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Each story ran for multiple years, with the latter continuing to appear on newspaper front pages as the war continues.
Like the coverage of governments building the massive global security architecture after 9/11 and the war coverage in Afghanistan and Iraq, media stories about COVID-19 and the Ukraine war hewed to a simple but somewhat lazy model: Believe those who are in power and promote their assessments as valid, no questions asked. Worse, criticize and cancel anyone who disagrees with the official policy.
We, the independent media, have no corporate bosses with their hidden agendas to oversee us. We largely deviated from the above model. We sought the truth, examined foreign news outlets that are not beholden to the pressures of Western corporate media and consulted history, which never lies. And we feel vindicated again as two powerful liberal voices grudgingly concede in two influential liberal publications that we were right all along.
For issues related to space, we will cover in detail the New York Times mea culpa about COVID-19 another day. Suffice it to say that the newspaper of record carried an article by Zeynep Tufekci, cleverly written in the third-person singular, “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”
The author, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, is a New York Times Opinion columnist. She writes: “Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China.”
Dr. Tufekci admits that all those officials and scientists have now been proven wrong. She points out that “the C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023.” She doesn’t refer to a recent report from Germany’s spy agency, which also thinks that an accident in a Chinese lab likely led to the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence it collected allegedly indicates negligence at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For a prominent liberal at one of America’s premier institutions to admit that our government, international health organizations, Big Pharma, and Big Tech all colluded to silence critics of the official propaganda, which is now proving to be wildly inaccurate, is horrifying.
Writing in The Hill, Alan J. Kuperman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses on military strategy and conflict management, reveals that Trump is right about Ukraine. This academic does not hide his distrust of the 47th president by beginning his article with the line: “I rarely agree with President Trump, but his latest controversial statements about Ukraine are mostly true.”
We have been critical of Ukraine’s war coverage and the glowing manner in which the media covered the Biden administration’s conduct during the war. Over 60 critical editorials were published on these pages long before President Trump even announced that he would seek a second term. Now, Prof. Kuperman says he agrees with us on three basic points that we have consistently made.
First, Prof. Kuperman admits that Ukrainian right-wing activists dethroned pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in the 2014 Maidan revolution, although Yanukovych had won free and fair elections. As early as September 2023, we said in an editorial that President Biden and his associates have had a continuous and influential presence in Ukrainian affairs since 2007. Aided by our government, including leaders like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Chris Murphy, and Victoria Nuland, their actions were closely tied to broader geopolitical tensions, particularly between the U.S. and Russia, with Ukraine as a focal point. We were among the first to say that many nations in the Global South were not convinced that Russia’s actions were unprovoked, which was why they had not condemned Russia’s actions. We also documented our distaste of Victoria Nuland’s interference in an editorial dedicated to her.
Second, Prof. Kuperman blames Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for contributing to “a wider war by violating peace deals with Russia and seeking NATO military aid and membership.” He goes on to criticize Zelensky: “Zelensky instead increased weapons imports from NATO countries, which was the last straw for Putin. So, on Feb. 21, 2022, Russia recognized the independence of Donbas, deployed troops there for “peacekeeping,” and demanded Zelensky renounce his quest for NATO military assistance and membership.”
We have repeatedly made these points in our columns. The Biden administration sought to portray the conflict as one in which Russia was the aggressor against a sovereign country. But this portrayal conveniently forgot to describe how the actions of Ukraine and the West for a prolonged period provoked Russia to attack as they threatened Russia’s very existence. The media was never curious to investigate what triggered the war, punishing anyone who questioned the Biden administration line.
Third, Prof. Kuperman correctly says that “Joe Biden contributed crucially to the escalation and perpetuation of fighting.” We have repeatedly criticized Biden’s refusal to use his State Department to de-escalate in Geneva and the weeks before Russia attacked. He gave a blanket check to Zelensky that America would support the war “for as long as it takes,” even as Ukraine began to lose territory and soldiers. We warned in an editorial on the eve of the first anniversary of the conflict that a vague, open-ended war policy could lead to World War III or a nuclear war. The Doomsday Clock indeed came closest to midnight during Biden’s term.
Politicians have been lying for as long as humanity has existed. However, the media, through its unique status as the Fourth Estate to speak truth to power, has always had the responsibility to hold the few in high offices accountable for their actions.
The media failed us miserably during the two most significant stories of the past two decades. It is little wonder that New Media outlets—independent organizations like us, podcasts, and social media influencers—are rising. It is a turn of fortunes that is likely not reversible.
