It could be said that Lois's theory of timeliness had been perfectly put into practice. With news, the order in which things came out was crucial. Sometimes, when certain people suppressed certain stories, it was not to erase them completely, but merely to buy time. As long as they delayed things until the right moment, the damage would be greatly reduced.
The same held true this time. Lois had moved far faster than the military, first releasing the news that she had been poisoned and that she and Superman were a couple. That way, when the military later revealed Clark's identity, it would easily become a footnote to those two earlier stories.
If that news had come out first, people might have focused on where Superman had come from and why he had fought those other alien monsters.
But now, everyone's attention was fixed on Lois being poisoned. Once that news came out, people naturally saw it as an important clue exposing the truth about the military's attempted cover-up. Once it became a secondary matter, it was no longer so important.
Although plenty of people discussed the matter itself beneath the article, public opinion developed much more freely on other platforms. Almost everyone guessed that, after Lois's poisoning had been exposed, they had immediately gone after her boyfriend in order to suppress the reporter.
This sort of thing was all too common. If they could not deal with the person herself, they went after her family and close friends, tying up her attention while smearing her social circle and lowering the public's opinion of her.
Which brought the question back to square one: why had the military poisoned Lois?
What was it that had made them go so far as to target her boyfriend just to utterly ruin her reputation?