There were those who were sounding the alarm about this lab leak hypothesis well over a year ago. The overwhelming media narrative to look away from that hypothesis and smear those who talked about it was always artificially manufactured in a way that should have been obvious to most people.
But this kind of misinformation is really par for the course with the mainstream media. If you're only paying attention to ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. (and downstream from those sources) for your day-to-day news - you're in the worst manufactured media bubble in existence. Those big media companies are a locus of power that is manipulated to an incredible degree.
I'm not telling you to drink the koolaid and only watch Fox News while reading Breitbart. I'm definitely not telling you to waste your time on Alex Jones or someone like that. I'm saying to balance what you look at with other information sources with a variety of political slants. This WIV narrative is just one of many that the MSM has been pushing over the last few years. It scares me how gullible people have been on so many topics.
I know several people whose happiness is based upon whether or not the Atlanta Falcons or Braves are having a good season. It's bizarre to me, but there it is.
And again, I still don’t even know why this is more important than the task of dealing with the pandemic first. Pointing fingers directly led to a simpleton policy of blocking flights from China, which was the extent of public health measures for weeks. Cases were pouring in from italy without anyone doing quarantine follow up or contact tracing. It took months to get PPE and adequate testing in place.
Even today, as variants occur (hey, but nobody seems to care that those have origins too right?), there are literally Republicans fighting measures against public safety and calling into question the efficacy of vaccination.
If you view Fox News as one of many competing news outlets, sure, it's got a big voice. But I'd urge you to view it in terms of collective narrative. The left-leaning narrative bubble is far larger than Fox News by more than an order of magnitude. When CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, the AP, NYT, WaPo, ESPN, late-night comedy hosts, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all driving the same narrative that it's conspiracy theory to consider the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a possible source of COVID... Fox News' mild protestations to the contrary are insignificant in terms of bandwidth into the American psyche.
There's this general situation where yes, there is that ecosystem 1 and downstream sources OP mentioned, and there is the ecosystem 2 (Fox and downstream sources).
However, former POTUS and ecosystem 1 cycled between themselves a fair bit, ecosystem 2 and former POTUS cycle, so by proxy eco1 and eco2 are cross-linking to each other in a sense, and so on.
I'm not telling you that there is no good way to parse info sources out there, but I am telling you the "MSM vs. other" delineation that OP is calling for awareness of doesn't really exist if you study the actual information flow... which this team did.
If you want my advice, read primary sources on events that matter to you. Studies, court documents, and so on. It's what that whole confusing ecosystem uses as well, and you can get the raw data without the analysis.
- the study: https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fra...
- discussion on the study: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-yochai-benkler-m...
Facebooks top groups are all conservative. I realize that they end up getting a lot of attention for the spread of misinformation and getting moderated into oblivion for it, but Facebook is a huge hub of conservative influence as the past two elections cycles pretty much demonstrated.
This is why I don’t hold conversations online. I had other points that weren’t worth addressing apparently and this isn’t really going to lead anywhere so good luck to you.
Big difference between the Fox News and Fox News news.