As I said yesterday, journalists are acting shocked – SHOCKED – that Trump, his administration, and his campaign might have lied to them about the president’s COVID status. They are so shocked that today Kaitlan Collins on CNN suggested that a doctor who has no history of lying to the public might have given false information in an interview when the doctor said that the positive test came back 72 hours ago and treatment began 48 hours ago even though the public had only been notified a bit less than 36 hours before.

Relevant quote:

I don’t know if it was inadvertent, if he didn’t know when we found out the president had coronavirus, but he is saying that the president tested positive around the same time, or that’s when they learned. So it’s going to raise massive questions about why. If the president tested positive for coronavirus 72 hours ago and we only found bought it 36 hours ago — and nobody has felt the need to clear that up —  it’s going to raise major questions about everything we know about what’s been happening here in the last few days at the White House and the president’s health.

As I said yesterday, the shock appears to be a result of the fact that the journalists themselves were taken in. They are used to the administration and the campaign lying, of course, but Trump and his team are such bad liars that they’re used to broadcasting lies that people in the know, like themselves, never believed in the first place. In other words, they don’t mind using their careers to provide Trump with suckers as long as they themselves are not the suckers. What is rocking the journalistic world is not that Trump lied, but that Trump successfully lied to them and that this put their own lives at risk. Lies to coal miners that put their lives at risk? You’ll hear no outrage. Lies to people with preexisting conditions that they will be protected? You’ll hear no outrage. These lies have the power to kill people, but they don’t kill wealthy beltway journalists, and that is the difference.

As I said, if journalists don’t want to have their own lives put at risk by a lie, they have to stop using their careers to boost the political careers of people who use lies to harm others. To do otherwise is to fully buy into the idea that when all the other faces have been chewed off, the leopards really won’t come for the leopards’ own supporters.

I would hope that if nothing else the vanity of these highly-placed, highly-paid journalists would motivate them to act as if they aren’t so stupid as to believe that.

Seriously, journalists, if only out of vanity, please report when these fuckers are trying to kill people. Or at the very least, don’t act surprised when the politicians who have been spreading lethal lies for their own gain for years decide to target you with the same.