It would serve us well to distinguish between different types of media critiques.
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.
> 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.
Depends on your audience. There are people who love ridicule of conspiracy theories, even if they are completely closed off to any conspiracy theory being real.
There is no such thing as "conspiracy theories". "Conspiracy theory" is itself a loaded term used equate any independent research critical of mainstream consensus with the ravings of lunatics. A theory can be:
(1) either confirmed, debunked or unproven;
(2) either originating from an authoritative source, originating from a non-authoritative source, or of unknown origin;
(3) either promoted, downplayed, or ignored by any particular media outlet.
These are, again, three orthogonal axes that you are implicitly, and stubbornly, conflating.
Anyone sensible is not even asking themselves if "conspiracy theories" are true. They're asking themselves where the hell they come from, why are they so contagious, what prevents societies from effectively containing them, and what are the long-term effects on our societies' health.
Or maybe anyone sensible is looking to profit from the confusion, and I'm a raving lunatic... Have you considered becoming one yourself?
That comment might as well seem to be a camel, but what it is an indictment of the exact same conflation that you conclude with. The fact that you are correctly able to make equivalent distinctions (more or less) in the paragraphs preceding that conclusion reeks of bad faith.
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.