That's the same as saying that it's a bad idea to report on any public denial of wrongdoing.

If there is no reporting of claims of innocence, than the accusation tends to stand as their guilt in the public mind. At that point, we have a system of trial by media and politics.

Society politicized healthcare, science, and academia decades ago. It has to live with those consequences, which will include suspicion of lies, lies, public accusations, and their necessary public refutation.

In a future system, maybe society will arrive at a means to keep accusations private. Though, it has long moved in and even celebrated the opposite direction.

One means of denying hysteria to false accusations would be to allow reasonable public discussion of both sides of any issue. In this case, the lab leak theory in general. In the case at hand the side denying the accusations, broadly speaking, prohibited that possibility.

The headline wording here is a conscious choice, it's extremely leading.

It seems clear to me.

I think it was LBJ who said "I'll call the guy a pig fucker just to make him deny it".

I'm not sure about this; the practical effect if you adopted this rule would be that if someone was to search for this, they'd find a bunch of conspiracy theorists claiming that scientists had been bribed (plenty of media has no concerns about amplifying conspiracy theorist stuff), with no refutation.

Like, in an ideal world, these sorts of grand conspiracy theories which kind of rely on all the scientists in the world being in on it wouldn't be taken seriously by anyone, and could be left alone. But that's not the world we live in, and it's appropriate to give the people they accuse of stuff the right of response.