Is it the job of responsible news media to report on hypotheses, as opposed to substantiating things with facts? The lab leak hypothesis was initially pushed in the mainstream as pure speculation in support of the do nothing President deflecting blame onto anyone else rather than accepting the responsibility of leadership. That echoes to this day. There is indeed a huge intellectual travesty around the topic, as well as most other matters about Covid, and blame for that is shared between both teams of partisans.
What else would you call reflexively blaming China rather than acknowledging there is a problem? Even if China deliberately created and spread Covid, we still needed domestic leadership, not "it's just like the flu". I was still giving Trump the benefit of the doubt figuring he was going to come around to addressing reality by at least June, but nope. He essentially had been handed a shoe-in second term on a silver platter for being a crisis time President, but threw it away for what we can only guess.
We can debate policy and what-not until we're both blue in the face.
What facts there are clearly demonstrate the Trump Administration started the development and roll-out for mass vaccination. All of the shutdowns and other well-meaning-but-misguided "flatten the curve" plans became politically virtuous. In hindsight, almost all of these efforts were for not, and many caused more harm than good.
Within all that noise - China most likely did have a lab leak from a lab that the US Government already knew was severely lacking safety precautions. Trump saying that out loud caused a knee-jerk reaction from his opponents and suddenly China was made to look like a victim of racism, etc.
NPR and similar ran with that narrative and buried the most probable cause because it made Trump look like an incompetent racist moron - which is good for their agenda.
Today, here we are, debating NPR propaganda like it was reality. So, I'd say it worked quite well...
I was talking about leadership. Making broad appeals to all constituents, to encourage people to do societally beneficial things without having to resort to the force of law. "Stay home and wear a respirator when you do go out" would have gone a long way to obviating the draconian state responses. In my state, the governor made such a stay at home suggestion but no actual order. It worked great because most people followed the advice rather than seeing the subject as an impingement on their rights to rage against.
I do agree that half of the sensationalist media reflexively reaches for the racism card to create outrage, and often times it's baseless or a red herring at best. But it takes two "sides" to stoke the "culture war", and Trump most certainly played the part.
