CNN's Smerconish complains of COVID lab leak theory 'politics,' despite network dismissing it for months

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Crenshaw: Fauci, media dismissing Wuhan lab leak was 'always nonsense'

Republican congressman and former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw argues the most 'plausible scenario' for origins of the coronavirus was always a lab leak.

CNN host Michael Smerconish waxed poetic Saturday about how the origins of COVID-19 have been turned into a political football, despite his own network largely dismissing the Wuhan lab leak theory for months.

"Sadly, the origin of Covid-19 has become yet another of those issues where we suit up in our partisan armor before we have all of the facts," Smerconish said, accompanied by the chyron, "Origin of COVID poisoned by politics." "Smerconish calls out the politics of COVID-19 origin theories," the title of Smerconish's monologue on CNN.com read.

The host went on to challenge social media users and callers who have asked the question, "who cares?" about the virus' origins, insisting that "he cares" because "there needs to be accountability." 

But viewers who watched Smerconish try and paint himself as a warrior in the fight for information recalled how CNN not so long ago treated any news of a lab leak as a conspiracy. Much of the media have only begun to seriously examine the idea the virus could have escaped from a lab in recent weeks. Speculation has only grown since a Wall Street Journal report last week revealed that three lab researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 with COVID-like symptoms. 

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CNN made several appearances in freelance writer Drew Holden's recent thread about the media's about-face on the lab leak theory. For instance, the outlet quoted a virologist calling the theory "out of a comic book," and Chris Cillizza published a piece bragging that Dr. Anthony Fauci "crushed" former President Donald Trump's belief that the virus could have escaped from a lab. As Holden noted, Cillizza was a "key voice" for the network on this subject.

Smerconish said if the lab leak theory proves true, it should spur an investigation into gain-of-function research and how much of a role U.S. funding played in it. His guest, former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, agreed the media "has let us down" by taking a "flimsy story" about natural occurrence at face value. 

"Mainstream media, newspapers and television networks, they just bought into that story without doing any serious digging of their own," Wade said. "That is why we have been in this sort of delusion for more than a year. Our media has let us down by failing to investigate a very flimsy story that these two groups of virologists put out." 

But again, the host did not call out CNN as one of the culprits.

Smerconish later revealed the results of a poll on Smerconish.com showing a majority of voters believed COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, as opposed to having developed naturally. "Wow," he said in response, adding the answer probably would have been much different if the question had been asked just a few weeks earlier.

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CNN host Chris Cuomo incorrectly told viewers this week that the U.S. government never took the lab leak notion seriously until recently. NewsBusters uncovered a clip that Cuomo reported on the possibility last April.

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President Biden announced this week he had asked the intelligence community to more closely assess the virus' possible origins and to report back to him in 90 days.