Parts of Sacks’s prediction line up with what happened in 2022, but the core causal and intentional claims can’t really be verified.

What clearly did happen

• By 2021–22, a strong “back to normal” / end‑restrictions narrative was already dominant in COVID coverage across the political spectrum, emphasizing reopening, economic recovery, and “life after COVID.” This shift predates the 2022 U.S. midterms and is described as the dominant COVID narrative since January 2021 in a media‑analysis report using Zignal Labs data. (thisissignals.com)
• In 2022, governments, experts, and media widely adopted “live with the virus” framing—arguing that society must move from emergency footing to ongoing coexistence with COVID. Academic work explicitly describes this as a cross‑cutting narrative used by politicians, experts, and media, motivated by economic concerns and fatigue, not specifically by U.S. midterm politics. (mdpi.com)
• Public behavior and attitudes by mid‑2022 had also shifted: an Annenberg survey in July 2022 found worries about COVID’s health effects declining, mask use indoors collapsing, and the share of Americans who say they’re back to “normal, pre‑COVID‑19 life” more than doubling versus January. (asc.upenn.edu) That suggests a broad societal move away from crisis mode, which news outlets were reflecting.

What didn’t clearly happen as described

• When President Biden said on 60 Minutes in September 2022 that “the pandemic is over,” major mainstream outlets (NPR, New York Times, etc.) reported the remark but also highlighted that 400–500 Americans were still dying daily and quoted experts who criticized or questioned his framing. (woub.org) That is not a clean flip to an “opposite” narrative of “no big deal”; it’s a mixed narrative of both normalization and ongoing risk.
• Research summarizing U.S. COVID coverage up to 2021 finds American media unusually negative about COVID compared with other countries, regardless of outlet ideology, and there is no widely cited 2022 content‑analysis showing a wholesale reversal to predominantly positive/minimizing coverage; instead, coverage volume and focus shifted as cases and deaths declined from 2021 levels and as policy moved toward endemic management. (en.wikipedia.org)

Why the prediction can’t be cleanly scored

• The observable part of the prediction (“coverage becomes much less alarmist / more ‘it’s over’ in 2022”) is only partially borne out: there was a sustained shift toward “back to normal” and “living with the virus,” but mainstream outlets continued to foreground ongoing deaths, long COVID, boosters, and disagreements among experts.
• The unobservable part—Sacks’s key mechanism—is that this flip would be driven by the midterm election outcome the media wanted, with outlets consciously contradicting and “memory‑holing” prior narratives to help that outcome. That requires evidence of editorial intent and coordinated election‑driven strategy that we simply don’t have. The same narrative shift is documented in non‑U.S. and non‑election contexts, and is plausibly explained by vaccines, variant evolution, economic pressure, and audience fatigue, not just U.S. midterms.

Because some surface‑level elements (less emergency tone, more normalization in 2022) did occur, but the crucial claim about why (explicit election‑driven, memory‑holing behavior by mainstream media) can’t be established from available evidence, the fairest classification is ambiguous, not clearly right or clearly wrong.