After another pouting, dishonest press conference Thursday by Donald Trump, media critic Eric Boehlert again asked when the mainstream media will begin calling a liar a liar.
In recent days Trump has lied to an anxious nation about:
– Having disbanded the White House’s pandemic team.
– The availability of a coronavirus vaccine.
– Americans being able to get tested.
– All Americans returning from overseas are being tested.
– U.S. infections would go down.
– Invoking the Defense Production Act.
– The virus being contained.
– Google creating a website to help people evaluate their virus symptoms.
– FDA approving chloroquine for use in coronavirus.
Yet where are the “Trump Lies About Pandemic” headlines, which would be completely accurate statements for news outlets to make without apology? Why don’t we see them and hear them?
He has some pretty good cases in point, notably the New York Times calling Trump everything but the L-word, with much softer effect.
Look at how the New York Times covered the story of Trump’s transparent Google lie. According to the newspaper’s weirdly creative language, Trump “oversold” the idea of the Google contribution, and “inflated the concept far beyond reality.” Note that for anyone using normal, everyday descriptions for current events, that meant Trump just flat-out lied during a national briefing about a monumental health crisis in this country. And he lied about something that would be easily, and almost instantly, found to be false when reporters checked in with Google for confirmation. Trump did that because he makes no calculation about which lies to tell, whether he can get away with them, and if there are any occasions where he should refrain from lying. He just lies about everything, all the time.
And the press won’t call him a liar.
Days later, the Times published a front-page piece that documented how his sudden claim that he had always assumed coronavirus would morph into a pandemic was almost comically false. But at the Times, Trump was not lying, he was merely trying to “rewrite his history.”
Trump knows it works. Even now, 40 percent of the U.S. approves of him. Some polls indicate majority approval of his handling of the coronavirus crisis, even as he blames the states for a shortage of ventilators and other supplies.