Of course I feel a little bad telling people this because it's pretty easy to avoid. Once TV news becomes unpopular they'll probably start shoving the same stuff into something that was previously mostly free of that kind of thing.
There were (and still are) multiple “lab leak” theories that are in widespread circulation, ranging from “it is possible that there was accidental infection at a research facility” all the way to “it is a bioweapon”
The scientific community has always discounted the latter.
Also, science is evidence based, and so many scientists are (rightly) hesitant to make conclusions (and to support others conjecture) unless they have some sort of evidence to support it. China knows this, and knows they can avoid bad publicity altogether by limiting the evidence that is released. Scientists are not in a position to make political accusations in the absence of other information. “We don’t have any evidence to support that theory” is perfectly reasonable scientific statement, regardless of the political realities.
Anyway, one of the problems with media consolidation is that people don’t hear competing narratives, so whatever narrative a small group of people decide on is what ends up feeling true to people.
You can discount it from the lack of evidence. I can be considered again once some evidence is available.
Not all news stations are the same, not all countries have the same TV news.
It is easy to just give up and think that you cannot trust anyone. But, the reality is that there is many journalists that care and try to create high quality news. To put them all in one bag is not fair, nor helpful.
The problem lies in finding the high-quality journalists. A default assumption of “TV news is crap” is warranted by the signal-to-noise ratio. Nobody’s putting them in the same bag; they are already there and must be sorted out. And that takes time and attention that is already scarce for most people.
I don’t know if there is a viable solution to this that doesn’t start with journalists themselves. As you say, some have a great record. IMO part of that is, and will increasingly involve, more extensive provenance and supplementary documentation for the stories they report, whenever possible.