The mainstream news media suffered yet another major blow on Sunday. A bombshell report from the Wall Street Journal revealed the Energy Department concluded that COVID-19 more than likely emerged from a Chinese laboratory and not from nature. The agency’s change of position is based on “new intelligence” that it shared with the White House and key members of Congress, according to the report, and brings the department in line with the FBI, which declared its belief that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak in 2021, though for different reasons.

The report defies years of legacy media coverage on the subject. For a long time, it was considered racist and xenophobic even to suggest that COVID-19 emerged from anything but natural origins. Anyone who raised the possibility of the lab-leak theory was shouted down by the sneering media and their political allies and branded as a "conspiracy theorist." For instance, the New York Times, ever quick to torpedo its own integrity in return for ephemeral social capital, accused Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) of repeating a “fringe theory” when he referenced the lab leak. "Fact check" websites such as Politifact assured its ever-docile readership that the lab-leak “conspiracy theory” had been "debunked." CNN published numerous articles that belittled the lab-leak theory, calling it “outright ridiculous ” and “magical thinking.” Such examples are endless.

It’s remarkable to consider the breadth and depth of journalistic failure in this era, especially regarding the global pandemic. For instance, they were wrong to assert that vaccinated people do not spread COVID-19. As it happens, they do .

They were also wrong about the effectiveness of masking in stopping the spread of infection. The Cochrane Review, described by the National Institutes of Health as the “gold standard for meta-analytic reviews,” determined that masks probably made “little to no difference” in reducing the spread of COVID-19. Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who was the review’s lead author, leveled the media’s contention that masks saved lives by saying , “There is just no evidence that they made any difference. Full stop.”

And following the Wall Street Journal’s report on Sunday that gives credence to the lab-leak theory at the highest levels of government, it appears they were wrong about COVID-19's origin, too.

It’s fair to ask: What exactly did the legacy media get right about COVID-19?

The truly sad thing is that the public needs to be informed by critical reporting now more than ever. There are real and dire implications of the lab-leak theory being proven true, particularly as it relates to the United States’s relationship with China, which is growing more fragile by the day . But instead of dealing honestly with the origins of the virus, the media kowtowed to organizations such as the World Health Organization, which is little more than an arm of the Chinese Communist Party , and peddled the lie that the lab-leak theory was part of an “infodemic.”

We need more than an acknowledgment of failure or even an admission of guilt. For the public to regain trust in our news media, we need truth and reconciliation. We need to know why these mistakes were made and what institutional steps are being taken to prevent them in the future. The media endangered countless people with their poor performance and partisan hackery. Incredibly, these are the same people who tried to prop up the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board. Thank God we were able to laugh that off the planet before it was too late.

For now, here’s a phrase to which our fearless journalist class might be able to relate: We see you. It’s time to come clean.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.