a) Did it form in nature or in a lab?
b) Did it become more communicable via nature or via the lab?
c) Did it make it to humans through nature (or wet market) or via the lab?
d) If it came from the lab was it on purpose or an accident?
as simply "OMG IT CAME FROM A LAB" and then claimed it's all a conspiracy theory.
The media as a whole shot themselves in the foot on this one and we'll all be worse off for it.
This isn't something I'm celebrating, though. It's not a sign of a successful state when everyone is losing confidence in the press.
One the one hand, there's the critique that media institutions are becoming more commercialized, dumbed-down, and turned in to infotainment, where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of shouting matches and sensationalism.
There's another critique that media is in service or left-wing, right-wing, capitalist, or corporate special interests and parrots the party line.
Yet another critique is that the media doesn't give marginalized voices enough air time.
So when you say "everyone is losing confidence in the press" that may be true in general, but different people are doing so for very different reasons.
The grandparent comment seems to be a critique of the third category, where they seem to want the mainstream media to give more air time to conspiracy theories in direct contravention to the consensus of the scientific community: which is that SARS-CoV-2 came from nature, not from a lab.
My actual criticism was closer to your first category: "where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of shouting matches and sensationalism"
But thank you for demonstrating my point by re-collapsing all four questions into one.