According to Tufekci, the blame rests on the scientific community's consensus that everything we were told about the virus, the lockdowns, and more was all true despite there being very strong indications that it wasn't: 

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Yet, as you read on, you realize this entire thing is a non-apology, as Tufekci basically goes on to accuse those people of being bad faith actors just throwing conspiracy theories around for their own personal benefit. You know the ones. Those deplorables, the unwashed, and the MAGA fans: 

Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

I'm going to stop here because Tufekci just highlighted something that drives me absolutely bonkers about these "journalists" at legacy news organizations. 

Nothing is ever their fault. In fact, they're victims. Victims of bad information, victims of the ideological opposition they face, and enemies of democracy. You see, they've been the good guys all along, they were just misled. 

Apparently, Tufekci, like other journalists, forget they're journalists. 

Getting down to the bottom of everything is their job. They don't take the word of the expert or the powerful at face value. They dig and dig until they have the full truth in their hands, because if there's one thing we all know (and they like to remind us when there's a person in office they don't like) the powerful lie. Authorities lie. Bureaucrats lie. It's a time honored tradition, really. 

But here we see a classic case of journalists lying. 

Tufekci and her ilk knew exactly what they were doing. They knew they weren't getting the whole story. In fact, they spent an inordinate amount of time trying to hide the whole story from the people. As Jordan Boyd at The Federalist noted, the media was complicit in covering up the truth and attacking the people who disagreed: 

Media also had agency, and they used it to lie and besmirch free-thinking Americans.

The press’s public smears and fake fact-checking campaigns about the Covid lab-leak theory fueled the biggest online censorship campaign this country has ever seen. Without corporate media articles casting doubt on Covid regime skeptics, such as Tufekci’s claims that Sen. Rand Paul’s Twitter objections to the masking narrative were “just plain wrong,” Big Tech would not have gotten very far.

Tufekci’s latest article begs Americans to have sympathy for a publication she claims was duped on the facts but ultimately proves her and NYT’s guilt.

The truth is, legacy media journalists are caught in a web of their own making. 

For starters, they are a propaganda wing of the Democrat Party, and the Democrat Party was having the greatest time of its life forcing the people to do things they didn't want to do. Unending lockdowns, vaccine mandates, shuttering churches, arresting dissenters, imposing travel restrictions, and all while having no intention of imposing those rules on themselves. 

The media was ideologically geared to the point of programming to assist these Democrats in accomplishing their authoritarian aims, and that meant attacking anyone who openly disagreed and called them out. 

Then, of course, there's the fact that elite consensus among the legacy media class wouldn't allow for disagreement. In order to stay in the club and have your back pat by your peers, you had to agree. Not only did you have to agree, you had to sneer at anyone who didn't. This is the top of the media food chain, and that means you know better than everyone below you. You are the enlightened, the connected, and the narrative. You decide what is truth. 

It's a mentality that saw the elderly die alone in hospitals, children as young as five fall into depression and develop learning disabilities, and for Americans to watch as their livelihoods fell into ruin. Drug use and alcoholism spiked, depression rose, and isolation destroyed relationships. 

But according to the New York Times, it wasn't their fault. They were just misled. 

No, they're guilty, and they're not even really sorry for it. This will remain one of the greatest stains on the legacy media, and one of the reasons distrust will haunt it for as long as it exists, which hopefully won't be for much longer.