QOTD II -- Media, Do Your Job

"It is a matter of universal consensus among experts, journalists, career officials, and people of good faith generally that Trump botched the response in tragic fashion. His desire to dramatically recalibrate public expectations of what constitutes success reflects an awareness of his own failures and a desperation to deceive people about them, all to minimize political harm to himself. [snip]

"The test here is not just whether he can game allied and broken institutions to present this falsified history as truth, or a matter of legitimate debate. It’s whether he can exploit a mass forgetting of the very thing that made the idea of a Trump presidency so unacceptable in the first place, now that one of the great warnings has come to pass.  [snip]

"It would seem to defy natural law that a man could do so much manifest harm, in such a well-documented way, with such horrendous consequences, and yet gain the lasting faith of one-time skeptics, while losing none of his supporters. But there are no fundamental properties of politics that consign failed leaders to defeat; they have to be defeated. Trump will exploit all the weaknesses he’s exposed in our systems of accountability to prevent that from happening, and he’ll do it shamelessly, because this is a final test for him, too. Whether he prevails or not is up to the very people whose power to spread truth and shape public opinion he undermines largely unchallenged every day." -- Brian Beutler challenging a largely supine media to report the facts and truth about the criminal incompetence of Donald "Moron Vector" Trump in responding to the coronavirus outbreak.  In other words, media, do. your. job.