Comments like this bring up so many questions in my mind -- do you prefer conservative news media? If so, are you struggling to find news media to consume?
Are you aware of the top cable news network, the newer smaller ones, the media holding companies that dominate local news affiliates and dictate conservative talking points through their hosts, the massively popular hard-right conservative influencers, Facebook, etc?
All one has to do is look at the top reaching posts on facebook each week - it's mostly right-wing pundits like Ben Shapiro or Dan Bongino. Occasionally Bernie Sanders or AOC breaks into the list, but usually overwhelmingly right-wing pundits.
It’s not that the media wanted to avoid helping Trump or hurting Biden, even going so far as to withhold reporting the truth of the pandemic’s origin. But rather that the media had a higher threshold of evidence for publishing accusations of malfeasance against another nationstate than Trump did, and hadn’t met that threshold till recently.
Trump was notoriously flippant, with low or no standard for truth, or even merely diplomatic tact. His MO is not truth-finding but rather saying anything distressing to his political adversaries. He is an archetypal Internet troll with the soapbox of the US presidency.
He spent four years doing that, essentially crying wolf over and over. By the time the pandemic hit, the media was universally resistant to serving as a megaphone to amplify his trolling.
Thus they held back on this story until they could piece together and verify enough of it to meet their higher threshold of evidence. That simply took until now to do.
Media and threshold of evidence? You need suspension of belief if you even want to consider it for a moment. The case of 5g causing corona being covered recently, without instant ban like lableak theory, is a case in point.
We have an actively status-quo favoring media, not an activist one. The former president was a pathological liar (thousands of documented clear lies during his office), and there were (and are) extremely good reasons to ignore more or less anything he said.
There are reasons to ignore what Trump says - not reasons to believe the opposite of what he says. In other words, if Trump says "Covid was made in a Chinese lab" that shouldn't convince anyone either way. I'm afraid it may have convinced our media though that "Covid was definitely not made in a Chinese lab" and that is basically the same mistake as believing everything Trump says.
To paraphrase one of my favorite comedies, Super Troopers:
“But Trump’s lies are cheeky and fun!
Yeah, and the establishment’s lies are cruel and tragic.”
Of course this is an overstatement; Trump’s lies were not pretty but the point is that obvious lies are significantly less damaging than well-hidden lies. It’s the skillful liars that one needs to be wary of.
During the election, most of the media decided to ignore anything they were afraid would help Trump or hurt Biden.
Whether an activist media is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.