In January 2020 Senator Tom Cotton called for a targeted China travel ban to prevent spread of the Covid virus (letter posted here). Senator Cotton was warning that China was covering up the lethality of the disease and doing little to stop what became a global pandemic. Politico’s Burgess Everett recognized that Senator Cotton’s expression of his concerns gave him “a three-month head start” over his colleagues.

In February 2020 Senator Cotton ventured the hypothesis that the virus “might have something to do with the laboratories conducting dangerous research on similar viruses in the city,” as Isaac Schorr puts it in his Mediaite retrospective on the abuse administered to Senator Cotton by the deep thinkers of our garbage media establishment. Schorr observes that Senator Cotton’s comments “were treated as not just factually mistaken, but morally repugnant.”

Schorr begins with the New York Times and the Washington Post, “arguably the two most venerated institutions in print journalism. On February 17, 2020, the day after Cotton’s interview on Fox, both ran a variation of the same headline”:

“Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” lamented the Times, before accusing Cotton of contributing to an “infodemic.”

“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” explained the Post, which later issued issued a correction that still characterized the theory as “fringe.”

Let us skip in Schorr’s reckoning to Anne Applebaum, staff writer for The Atlantic, prominent historian, and member of the advisory panel for the Global Disinformation Index. She compared Senator Cotton’s comments to those of “Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS.”

The disparagement of Senator Cotton had an epidemic quality akin to the virus itself: “On Face the Nation, CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan turned to an envoy of the Chinese Communist Party in an apparent effort to debunk Cotton, asking the Chinese ambassador to the United States to respond to Cotton and then posting the clip with the caption NEW: @AmbCuiTiankai dismisses #coronavirus conspiracy theories pushed by @SenTomCotton that it’s being used as biological warfare as ‘absolutely crazy.’”

Schorr has more here. He rightly insists that it’s important to “remember the names of those who misled them.” As in the matter of the Russia hoax, however, the media’s motto in such matters is don’t look back. Schorr’s retrospective therefore seems to me a worthy entry in what should be a continuing project, but won’t.