AP Photo/Allison Robbert Dr. Anthony Fauci appears before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at the Capitol, Wednesday, July 29, 2026, in Washington. Anthony Fauci’s recent appearance before Congress is a good reminder that his reign of error during COVID would not have been possible without a deeply partisan and starstruck press.
As Fauci sat last week before members of Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment and wriggling in his seat like a toddler, one could not help but be reminded that this man was sold to the public as a real-life, living saint. He was treated as a savior — even as he lied through his teeth.
Fauci said he had “nothing to do” with the disastrous pandemic-era school closures, challenging critics to “show me a school that I shut down.” But his own diary reveals the truth.
In now-released personal notes, Fauci boasted of having persuaded New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools. He also bragged to himself that California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) chief of staff had told him personally that, “based on my TV appearances,” the governor “decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”
As a consequence, the education and development of countless children was set back; countless businesses beloved in their communities and personal livelihoods were destroyed by decisions that, in many cases, turned out to have no scientific basis at all.
One man was given too much power, and that was that.
As early as January 2020, Fauci had already privately ruled out a Chinese wet market as the source of the pandemic. He wrote in his diary — unwisely saved on a government server — that the market in Wuhan had been “not the source” but merely an “amplifier” of the virus. Yet he would spend the next several years suggesting the opposite, downplaying and dismissing suggestions of what seems obvious in retrospect — that the virus almost certainly escaped a Chinese virus lab connected to research funded by the agency he directed.
Fauci was hailed as a hero even as his recommendations ruined lives, drove suicides, and left the elderly to die in isolation.
Fauci even lied about his willingness to testify. In 2022, he said he was “very happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee.”
“I have nothing to hide,” he said. “I can explain and validate everything that I’ve done. … I’m going to do what I need to do, and that is cooperate fully, because we have nothing to hide at all,” he added in the CNN interview roughly four years ago.
Last week, cooperation was the furthest thing from his mind; then, the only thing that mattered was anything that could potentially incriminate him. He invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 110 times rather than answer questions about his oversight of the federal COVID-19 response. It turns out there is, after all, a way to shut the man up.
Fauci will entirely escape accountability. But there is no reason those who helped prop up his cult of personality should. The media can still be held accountable for how they failed the public, failures that took many forms.
Certain news outlets assured audiences early that COVID-19 was nothing to worry about.
Then certain news outlets inexplicably agreed to slap the labels “fringe theory,” “conspiracy” and even “racist” on any suggestion that the virus had escaped a lab, even though this was always the most likely scenario.
National Public Radio ran a report claiming scientists had “debunked” the “lab accident theory of pandemic emergence.” ABC News baselessly went with this: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 ‘is not a laboratory construct.'” Don Lemon, at the time a CNN anchor, hosted unprosecuted perjurer James Clapper to defend Fauci’s false claim that the virus had started in nature.
News outlets embraced the Beijing-approved talking point that said it was “xenophobic” to name the virus by its city or country of origin. U.S. newsrooms even degraded themselves to the point of praising Russia’s and China’s obviously bogus claims about driving down infection numbers through ridiculous, cartoonishly authoritarian measures that in real life probably killed far more people than they saved.
“How uncomfortable is it,” asked former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd, “that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this? Meaning, had China been a free and open society, this might have spread faster?” Note that not only were China’s claims about stopping the spread obviously false, but the virus he was referring to originated in and spread to the rest of the world from China.
In what can only be considered a piece of malicious reporting, some hacks even misconstrued the White House’s worst-case projections of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths for the administration’s desired death total.
The wildest media failure came in 2021 when the New York Times forced the resignation of longtime infectious-disease reporter Donald McNeil, who had spent decades covering Ebola and other deadly outbreaks. Parents and students on a Times cruise for privileged children reported him for saying the “n-word.” It turns out that McNeil had said it only in the context of asking a student to clarify a question she had posed to him, about whether a classmate should be suspended for once saying that word. Even after learning that context, editors Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn wrote in a staff memo: “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”
McNeil was replaced by the younger, inexperienced reporter who undermined the paper’s credibility by claiming that the COVID lab-leak theory was racist.
Six years later, none of these media incidents are any less shameful or embarrassing. Keep that in mind when you watch people who call themselves journalists complain that Fauci is being subjected to a “show trial” and “useless drama. Remember it the next time you hear Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) characterized as a “contemporary Joe McCarthy.”
Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.
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