[acdha]

I don’t think this is a conspiracy as much as motivated people with deep pockets making sure reporters, legislators, etc. keep hearing that message until they start thinking it’s newsworthy. Many of the stories have involved things like studies on productivity or health, or surveys of what businesses intend to do or have found to be productive – and those almost inevitably were funded by commercial real estate or retail business groups. Those groups have a ton of money to spend on PR teams who’ll keep their talking points in circulation and are constantly looking for new ways to link it to other things in the news. This can be self-reinforcing: write a “study” saying that working from home leads to people getting less exercise (oops, we meant their cars), make sure it’s covered in as much of the business press as you can, make sure every local official hears about it, and then you can repeat the whole process by running a survey finding that business leaders have heard that WFH is unhealthy. Since there isn’t a WFH trade group, there’s no counterbalance in those stories or a spokesperson getting asked to provide a response.

A lot of this comes back to the new to write new stories constantly. Remember a few years back when you’d see stories in news outlets about how cryptocurrency would transform daily life or a certain activity like going to concerts? That was the same mechanism: nobody really believed that, and nobody’s boss told them to write the story or they’d be fired, but a heavy promotion effort meant that journalists kept hearing about it until some of them wrote stories in case it turned out to be a real trend.