Trump was the boy.
Everybody knows how that story ended, but as a reminder:
"This tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, the villagers do not believe the boy's cries for help, and the flock is destroyed. The moral of the story is that liars will not be rewarded; even if they tell the truth, no one believes them. "
There's a cost to lying. Sometimes it's your own flock. Sometime's its everybody's flock. Maybe Trump was right, maybe he wasn't. The boy was right about the wolf, eventually, too. The moral remains the same.
How long was it between the writing of the Pentagon papers and their release? How long did the Catholic sex abuse situation take to be fully reported?
It's been a bit more than a year since the virus turned into a global pandemic. I'm willing to grant journalists a bit more leeway in the timeline for serious investigative journalism, particularly when the central locate is a somewhat secretive Chinese lab in an area that was completely locked down for months as the pandemic started.
You gotta remember they had time to "debunk" this theory. So apparently they had time to do something, except critical thinking.
This is in fact how the media has always behaved. It did this about more or less every major event in US history. Only when the tide has turned sufficiently within the culture as a whole does the media as a whole manage to embrace non-status-quo positions. There are always outliers, visible/audible from the start, who tell contrary stories, just as there have been for COVID19.
> "After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”"
Whom is that a lesson for?
There were many people in bioscience, virology, etc. who said it was possible and should not be discounted, but those people were hounded and shut up.
If I had to pick a "moral" of that fable, it's to never let your guard down, no matter what.
Sure, you can make the case for always ignoring past lies, and always evaluating every claim based on current evidence. The reason the story exists is to try to illustrate how most humans actually behave, despite there being a preferable response.
In addition, the evidence for the lab leak theory wasn't strong back when Trump became the mouthpiece for it. There wasn't much of a reason, even if you evaluated the current evidence for what could be another one of his thousands of documented lies, to take it particularly seriously.
That situation might be changing now, and we are seeing that in the media and culture right now, as we respond to new evidence, or more specifically, lack of other expected evidence.
Twitter and FB had policies against it and even now, today Twitter suspended the account for the Fauci email leaker(s). So much for open discussion.
Trump seems to occupy a super position in the brains of media types in this country. He is a idiotic buffoon who no one should take seriously and yet he somehow magically and constantly influences behavior that is directly related to their job.
Several media organizations (washington post, buzzfeed) submitted FOIA requests for the emails, and as per federal law, they were released. No leak, normal federal government policy process, driven by mainstream-y media outlets AFAICT.
Twitter has not banned discussion of the theory. Here's a thread from May 27th (Nate Silver) discussing it in some detail:
https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1397869883585708034
Here's Ryan Delk from May 23rd saying it even more clearly:
https://twitter.com/delk/status/1396583148524212226
They did have policies related to the lab leak theory, but it seems like a mischaracterization to say that the banned discussion of it.
The only person I can find who has lost their account over related matters is a NY Times reporter who closed her own account after making some fairly dumb remarks about the theory.
The goal posts will move on this, I guarantee it. Suddenly institutional media will claim they've been working on this story the entire time, and all of their pronouncements cajoling people into not thinking about this explanation will be completely memory-holed. I'm not being hostile to you, I'm expressing frustration here because this really does call into question nearly all of the reporting on the broader Pandemic response when we're just fully admitting here that they did this "because Trump". What other stories did they fuck up on "because Trump"?
Go back and look at the reporting on every major environmental disaster of the last 70 years, from DDT to oil tanker spills to lead in gasoline to anthropogenic climate change: same pattern. Trump had nothing do with any of them either.
Hint: the media is pro-status quo. On every story, there are a few outliers who provide contrarian accounts, while the majority take a don't rock the boat (much) approach. Eventually, evidence accumulates, the culture shifts, the media changes direction.
It's not, for once, about Trump.