Or even the possibility of a defector from China with potential information about COVID-19’s origins? RedState’s Jennifer Van Laar began reporting on this development a week ago, although while the source remained anonymous. Yesterday’s report from Spy Talk gave more heft to the story, whose report got co-published in The Daily Beast:

Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.

Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official before defecting after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a Wednesday tweet, Han, citing an unnamed source, alleged that China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and Communist Party foreign affairs boss Yang Jiechi demanded that the Americans return Dong, and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.

Spy Talk might not have a high profile in American media, but The Daily Beast certainly does. One might think that other media outlets would find this story worth reporting, even as a speculative matter. If the US really does have a high-level defector of Dong’s rank, it could be a game changer in US-China relations, and not just about COVID-19 origins.

That might be especially true in our nation’s capitol, nearly a day after the Daily Beast co-published the Spy Talk story and a week after Jennifer broke it. Yet a search of the Washington Post for “China defector” over the last week turns up only one story .. about Venezuela:

Democracy’s not the only thing that dies in darkness, it seems. What about the Paper of Record? A similar search at the New York Times also turns up one story … about the “vicious cancer” of K-Pop in North Korea:

What about CNN? Their search function defies description, and it doesn’t allow users to customize search parameters. (To be fair, ours is pretty rudimentary too.) Still, it doesn’t appear that they’ve covered anything about this “China defector” thus far:

It’s fair to point out that this story still remains without firm corroboration, and we still haven’t heard the full context of whatever this person has told investigators. It’s equally true that all three of these leading US news outlets have run stories on much less evidence on stories of much lesser import. Even the potential of having one of Xi Jinping’s trusted aides as a defector should at least prompt these outlets to alert their readers of the possibility, even while cautioning on pending validation. (Update: If media outlets want a good model to follow for that process, Allahpundit’s coverage from last night would be a good place to start.)

Perhaps they’ll begin working on stories over the weekend. Their curious lack of curiosity is still notable, however, especially a week after Jennifer broke the story at our sister site RedState. When they do finally cover it, will they credit her for the story — or pretend they just discovered it?