"The media's lab leak fiasco" by Matthew Yglesias in Slow Boring https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco

I'll admit, this is what finally convinced me that there was something wrong with how mainstream news media in the US covered the "lab-leak" hypothesis regarding COVID-19 early in the pandemic. I don't subscribe to the sort of "I told you so" attitude that some seem to have (there's still no real conclusion about whether a lab contributed to the pandemic, and "the" lab-leak hypothesis is a misnomer as it can encompass a wide variety of claims), but it lays out exactly how certain early lab-leak claims got mangled into conspiracy theories.