I missed this earlier, sorry and thank you for the well-researched post.
Among other things, I will happily agree with you that the Snopes page is simply not correct. I will not hold the NY times responsible for that, however.
As you have surely seen, in his twitter thread the senator does list "the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis" as a possible option, and also says that "the so-called experts" do not really know any better.
So I can see the viewpoint of the NY times: it is newsworthy if a senator lends credence to a possibility that scientists widely dismissed. As an analogy, a senator who believes that the earth is flat might be equally interesting for a news publication - even if it is masked by phrases like 'we need to keep an open mind', 'the experts might be wrong', etc -- 'the earth might be flat' is simply not a reasonable position for a senator to hold.
But I can also see your point. It was early days of the pandemic and there were lots of unknowns. The general gist of the argument was one of caution and keeping an open mind towards all possibilities, which was healthy. And for a senator it would have been hard at those times to distinguish between something that scientists almost universally dismissed and something that they were still debating about.
Perhaps we can agree that the newsworthiness of the content of the NY times article was not entirely obvious, and the reasons it was published anyway could have been political (even if this was not consciously done). Based on your research it seems that the resulting storm of negative publicity by other outlets was not justified.
Agree totally that NYT's framing of Cotton's position and statements was not reality based. If it exists, political bias is less significant than confirmation bias and echo chamber effects. Snopes has no excuse for not performing a basic check of NYT editorialized claims.
Please read the NYT editorial (2/17) [0] and Cotton's tweet (2/16) [1] again. The NYT claimed "Mr. Cotton later walked back the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon run amok." There is no walk back in that tweet. There is a continued questioning of the Chinese food market claims. Bioweapon is placed within the less likely range of different possibilities that start with natural transmission, noted by Cotton as being "still the most likely."
The tweet is in response to claims by a Washington Post article [2], later corrected with the statement "Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term “debunked” and The Post’s use of “conspiracy theory” have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus."
I'd like to visit your statement As you have surely seen, in his twitter thread the senator does list "the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis" as a possible option, and also says that "the so-called experts" do not really know any better.
The full final tweet in the thread is "We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
In your statement it sounds like Cotton is claiming experts aren't a good source for judging among possibilities. I think a stronger text-based interpretation is that he is writing about _transparency_ and that some people who are claimed as experts don't want transparency.
At least two of Cotton's public statements focused on Covid origins cited the Huang et al Lancet article [3] which was authored by physicians on the scene. Cotton didn't lend "credence to a possibility that scientists widely dismissed." He drew attention to the fact that there was authentic scientific disagreement with the claims of Chinese authorities about the origins.
The tragedy in all this is that the hypothesizing the virus' origin wasn't the significant part of the message. It was an example for the broader point that the outbreak was serious and that Chinese authorities were not behaving with candor. The specific analogy Cotton made repeatedly was to the Soviet Chernobyl response.
Among other things, I will happily agree with you that the Snopes page is simply not correct. I will not hold the NY times responsible for that, however.
As you have surely seen, in his twitter thread the senator does list "the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis" as a possible option, and also says that "the so-called experts" do not really know any better.
So I can see the viewpoint of the NY times: it is newsworthy if a senator lends credence to a possibility that scientists widely dismissed. As an analogy, a senator who believes that the earth is flat might be equally interesting for a news publication - even if it is masked by phrases like 'we need to keep an open mind', 'the experts might be wrong', etc -- 'the earth might be flat' is simply not a reasonable position for a senator to hold.
But I can also see your point. It was early days of the pandemic and there were lots of unknowns. The general gist of the argument was one of caution and keeping an open mind towards all possibilities, which was healthy. And for a senator it would have been hard at those times to distinguish between something that scientists almost universally dismissed and something that they were still debating about.
Perhaps we can agree that the newsworthiness of the content of the NY times article was not entirely obvious, and the reasons it was published anyway could have been political (even if this was not consciously done). Based on your research it seems that the resulting storm of negative publicity by other outlets was not justified.