>The Washington Post[1] did seem to engage in a a bit of introspection eventually

Unfortunately, this is a common tactic. Walking back a previous wrong assertion allows one to frame it as a virtue--"we corrected ourselves!"--in order to avoid talking about the original vice of being a copy-and-paste propaganda organ for the state.

There seems to be a very tight integration between the government and the major media, and this is a real problem. It's not surprising, as a journalist that is a burr in the saddle of government power soon finds it difficult to talk to government entities. But it is a problem if there really is no journalistic independence. In recent years, journalists seem to be little more than Twitter researchers. Complete randos from the Internet, some of whom were clearly a little bit mad, got closer to the actual truth than the "trusted experts."

One has to trust that the original intent was not malicious, otherwise the whole system falls apart. The leverage being used is tremendous.

The trust is not deserved, the original intent was malicious, and the whole system is a rotting corpse.

One doesn't have to trust that at all. One would be a fool to. If this is what the system is than it should fall apart.

Journalists without agenda barely exist anymore. You should assume malicious intent by default.

The issue was that the Post’s conclusions was an inevitable result of treating what public health authorities say as the truth and any heterodox voices as dangers to be silence. Introspection is meaningless if the post fundamentally doesn’t see anything wrong with that model and I think there is actually something to be said about treating mainstream medicine as authoritative truth.

And a couple months later the US federal government published an official report stating that a lab leak was a possible source of the virus.

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...

A very small bit.

Readers aren't parsing sentences this closely and comparing to previous statements.

Unless they come out with an editorial statement apologizing then they aren't really serious about their own involvement in censorship on behalf of those in power.

i think a retraction or minor edit after 99.9% of the readerbase has consumed the content, is too little, too late.

Damage done.

What do you mean by rewrote? Are you saying the Washingtgon Post published article calling a position a "fringe theory" which a previous, entirely different, article they published referred to as a "conspiracy theory"? Or are you saying they edited a single article, changing the text "conspiracy theory" to "fringe theory"?

In case it wasn't clear, it is a quote from a Washington Post article, which in turn describes how this (previous) article was edited/corrected:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

> In an article published Thursday, economist Jeffrey Sachs called for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sachs and his co-author, Neil Harrison, a Columbia University professor of molecular pharmacology and therapeutics, said that federal agencies and universities possess evidence that has not been adequately reviewed, including virus databases, biological samples, viral sequences, email communications, and laboratory notebooks. Sachs and Harrison also highlighted a tantalizing scientific detail that may be an indication that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, originated in a laboratory: a sequence of eight amino acids on a critical part of the virus’s spike protein that is identical to an amino acid sequence found in cells that line human airways [1]

If the Lancet Covid Commission is now claiming it is one of the foremost theories, then it is not fringe.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/05/19/covid-lab-leak-evidence-...

Looks like they made the edit clear with a correction note, however they have left that undated.

More of these are in order,

https://fee.org/articles/we-failed-danish-newspaper-apologiz...

Corrections get much less visibility than original accusations.

that's a solid distinction, dispute vs debunk. That's a keeper.

This misrepresents what happened and what was said. Which is easy to do.

From April 2: "The prime suspect is ‘natural’ transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.”"

Couple that with the admission from Cotton: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated [from the lab]"

Numerous experts in the field backed up the idea that the virus was engineered or came from a lab.

Even Cotton followed up with further clarification of his original tweets.

"I am pleased to hear you now distinguish between possibility virus was engineered bioweapon (which can be dismissed) and possibility virus entered human population through lab accident (which cannot--and should not--be dismissed)" - From Feb 16, 2020 (referenced in Feb 17, 2020 in Washington Post.

This timeline covers it well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-...

Is it bad that people update their thinking when new evidence presents itself? No.

But that doesn't mean people who pushed an idea without evidence should be lauded. A broken clock is right twice a day, after all.