The problem isn't that our authorities are changing their beliefs based on new evidence coming in. The problem is that our authorities are changing beliefs based on the current political situation, pretending that that reflects shifting evidence and, worst of all, not admitting that they've changed their views.

Let's take the current debate over the "lab leak" hypothesis as an example. A large amount of the evidence, both for and against the lab leak hypothesis dates back to March/April/May of 2020. Yet, when the lab leak hypothesis was raised around that time period, it was immediately and vociferously dismissed by the media as a racist ploy to distract from the government's shambolic handling of the pandemic. When the hypothesis was raised again, this year, it was treated as a serious possibility that deserved a full and thorough investigation.

What changed? It wasn't the evidence -- the evidence has been present all along. What changed was the political environment that suddenly made it possible to speak of a lab leak without sounding like tinfoil-hatted crackpot. As a result, now this previously unmentionable hypothesis is now getting its due consideration by the media.

However, the media isn't admitting that a change occurred. Instead, what the average person is seeing is mainstream media outlets shifting seamlessly from, "The lab leak hypothesis is a racist lie," to "The lab leak hypothesis is a serious allegation that deserves a thorough investigation." It's like the scene from 1984, where the Inner Party representative switches seamlessly mid-speech from discussing the ongoing war against Eurasia to the ongoing war against Eastasia.

We saw a similar phenomenon take place last year over masks. There were warnings about the virus being airborne as far back as January of 2021. As late as March, you had Time magazine saying that wearing a mask was "superstitious behavior" [1]. Over the next two to three weeks, the advice rapidly shifted, from "masks are a sign of unreasonable paranoia" to "masks are mandatory, and anyone not wearing them is putting everyone around them in danger". Was that due to a shift in the evidence? No. As noted above, there was ample warning that the virus was airbone, and many people were taking appropriate precautions even in the absence of official guidance. What shifted was the political environment.

Moreover, then, just as now, no media outlet ever admitted that it had given incorrect advice. There were individual journalists who (to their credit) admitted a certain level of responsibility, but, as far as I know, no major mainstream media outlet has come forward and said, "You know what? We screwed up, and we apologize." Instead , we see silent corrections that rewrite the past without admitting any kind of fault. Heck, just compare the headline on the Time article today [2] to the headline on the archived version. The headline was silently updated with a much more moderate point, and a caveat about changing CDC guidance was added. But there was no formal correction published anywhere that said, "You know that article we printed last week about masks being bogus? Yeah, that was wrong, and we're sorry."

Honestly, after seeing the performance of the media in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, I'm surprised that more people aren't as cynical about the "official story" as the cashier in the sibling thread.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200305052928/https://time.com/...

[2]: https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/