Journalist sparks an outpouring of bias from ABC over virus lab story

World Health Organisation spokesman Bob Dietz, discussing a bat-related virus outbreak at a ­laboratory in Beijing, said, “we suspect two people, a 26-year-old female postgraduate student and a 31-year-old male post doc, were both infected”.

Both were in the Chinese Institute for Virology in Beijing. Both were hospitalised and hundreds of their contacts quarantined. WHO Western Pacific regional director Shigeru Omi criticised the laboratory’s antivirus safeguards: “(Lab safety) is a serious issue that has to be addressed,” he said.

This was in 2004 after the second outbreak in China of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). This column on May 4 said that although the first outbreak of SARS came from a wet market in Guangdong in 2002, the second was from a lab doing the sort of work being done at two Wuhan labs, one only 300m from the city’s wet market, the larger one 12km away.

So why the criticism of Sharri Markson, from The Daily Telegraph, about her stories on the possibility COVID-19 was released accidentally at a lab when there is precedent? The ABC’s overstaffed but under-researched Media Watch program has devoted most of two programs to Markson. Why?

Media Watch host Paul Barry last Monday quoted approvingly from a story in the Nine Entertainment newspapers on May 7 discounting a Markson report from Saturday, May 2. Markson’s page one splash that day was based on what she called a “Western governments dossier” from the Five Eyes intelligence partners setting out a case that the labs could be the source of COVID-19.

As Markson tweeted on May 7, there is quite an irony in “the utter hypocrisy of the Nine newspapers dedicating … two senior journalists over at least two days to try to ­expose my confidential sources while going to court to protect their own”. She was referring to court cases in which the papers have tried to protect confidential sources for their investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Yet even if that Fairfax piece were right — and I don’t know where Markson got the dossier — so what if it was from the US embassy? The Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly confirmed on April 30, before the dossier story, that US intelligence agencies were investigating the lab leak theory.

Interested readers should check the Sky News website to watch Chris Kenny’s editorial about Markson’s stories on Kenny on Media last Monday night. Although he has only one two-days-a-week researcher to Media Watch’s nine staff, Kenny did the better job.

Media Watch runs for 15 minutes, Kenny on Media for an hour. Kenny also has a daily hour-long show Monday to Friday. Kenny has often hosted former ABC staff-elected director Quentin Dempster and allowed him to criticise the News Corp papers and Sky News. Critics are seldom invited on to Media Watch and hardly ever quoted in full.

Kenny’s program aired before the latest Media Watch but after the program’s first attack on Markson on March 4. Media Watch, following the line of left-wing US coverage, in both episodes conflated two separate ideas: the possibility that a naturally occurring virus being researched escaped accidentally from a laboratory, rather than the suggestion Markson did not make (but which was made in a small headline on May 2 written by a sub-editor) that the virus was created in a laboratory.

Much of the first Media Watch item was devoted to quotes from scientists saying the virus jumped from animals to humans and was not created in a lab. It quoted The Sydney Morning Herald of April 25: “The evidence is overwhelming that the virus that causes COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans, rather than escaping from a laboratory.” It quoted ­Nature magazine: “Our analyses clearly show SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct.” It quoted Sydney University’s Professor Eddie Holmes, who helped map the virus genome, and two CSIRO scientists denying the “manipulated virus” proposition.

On May 11, Media Watch again quoted people rejecting genetic manipulation. It quoted Dr Anthony Fauci, head of President Trump’s COVID-19 taskforce, saying: “This could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.” It reported Columbia University’s Maureen Miller saying: “It’s extremely unlikely this virus originated in a lab.”

Kenny on Monday said: “So Paul Barry and the ABC are certain the virus did not escape a lab. Brilliant work. Perhaps they should share their evidence … because this virus seems to be as contagious as ABC groupthink.” He then quoted several ABC journalists debunking “wild claims” about the possible virus link to a Wuhan lab, all essentially basing their view on the fact Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were talking about that possibility.

Hey, if the two most important leaders in the most powerful ­nation on Earth think the lab theory is worth investigating, it must be wrong, right?

Kenny went on to explain what still seems too complex for Media Watch: “For a virus to escape a lab does not mean it was created in a lab.”

Kenny discussed revelations from the previous day by American NBC television of unusual telecommunications patterns at the Wuhan Institute of Virology between October 7 and 24 that could suggest the lab had been cleared of people. Media Watch ­ignored that, as well as a powerful piece by Professor Clive Hamilton warning against dismissing the lab theory in the Nine Entertainment newspapers on Saturday, May 9. Neither the NBC nor Hamilton stories fitted the Media Watch “stitch-up” agenda.

Hamilton quoted from two scientific papers, one in the Lancet and one in the New England Journal of Medicine, showing substantial numbers of patients who were infected early with COVID-19 had no connection with the Wuhan wet market, which does not even sell bats or pangolins — the other possible source of animal-to-human transmission.

Hamilton also quoted a speech from China’s President Xi Jinping on February 14, declaring China must “close the loopholes exposed by the epidemic”, and announcing “the fast-tracking of a new law for biosecurity at laboratories”. None of this, nor Markson’s separate but fascinating revelations about training of Chinese scientists on bat viruses in Australia, proves the laboratory theory. Yet journalists are meant to be curious, and the latest revelations clearly boost the case for an international investigation into a pandemic that has claimed more than 300,000 lives.

Media Watch should look at the ABC’s own anti-Trump ­motives rather than trying to link Markson, a non-ideological news reporter who broke the story of Barnaby Joyce’s baby, to a News Corp conspiracy for Trump.

News broke last week that former president Barack Obama’s intelligence chief, James Clapper, the main source for Four Corners’ three-part 2018 Russia collusion Story of the Century, had in 2017 told congress under oath that he had never seen evidence of Trump conspiring with Russia to meddle in the 2016 election. Now that’s a Trump-Australian media conspiracy worth a Media Watch episode.

But don’t hold your breath.