Deliberate stupidity at news briefing

There sure was deliberate stupidity at the Thursday news briefing at which President Donald J. Trump seemed to endorse bombarding human bodies with ultraviolet light and possibly injecting household detergents into the human body to fight the COVID-19 virus.

He did not actually say that, although you could see Dr. Deborah Birx biting the inside of her cheek and strangling her hands because she knew what it sounded like. It sounded very much like an endorsement, like his previous love affair with hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

After four years of covering the man, the media scrub knows what he’s like. Instead of understanding that he habitually freelances and runs his mouth and thinks out loud, they went out of context and reacted as if he had endorsed cannibalism.

You can say he handed them a “gotcha” moment and they ran with it, and that would be true. But I am saying they could show more sense and savvy than that. Instead, most of the Big Names have their sharpened hatchets out. It’s like when Trump said “hundreds of governors” are calling him. You just sigh or leave it for the editorial cartoonists. You don’t have to have a conniption, which is the usual reaction of most mass news outlets.

The worst offenders are CNN and MSNBC, which cover the “story” on every one of their news shows, so it is endlessly repeated and creates its own gravity. Newspapers run it once and it’s down, but cable won’t give it a decent funeral.

Let me give you another example. About a month ago there was a flurry of stories about a Trump “meltdown.” Here’s what happens in many cases. A reporter, let’s say for the Washington Post, has a source in the administration who says he thinks the boss is losing it. With hundreds in the administration, that’s not hard to do and then the reporter finds a second source who agrees. Again, not hard to do with a president who destroys norms. The Post runs a story and the New York Times rushes to match it, and does. Then the AP and Reuters, the wire services, match the story and it is now world-wide. They all had their sources, but the story was an empty shell, more wishful thinking than reality.

It’s a narrative they enjoyed, really, but a month out, he’s as combative and as “normal” as he ever gets.

Trump’s unwise comments followed statements by Bill Bryan, an undersecretary at Homeland Security that “the virus is dying at a much more rapid pace” from exposure to humidity or heat. That good news was quickly lost when Trump then asked a series of questions about possible ways to tackle the rapidly spreading virus.

Questions, perhaps stupid, but not directions setting a course of action. He did not do that.

“Suppose we hit the body with a tremendous ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said. “I think that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it,” he said to Bryan.

“And then I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. . . . It would be interesting to check that.”

That was the comment that launched 1,000 memes. Like this one:

And this one:

And this one:

With the internet on fire, Trump walked back his comments. “I was talking out of my ass and I’m amazed you Fake News fools paid any attention to me,” he did not say. Instead, he said it was sarcasm, which it was not.

Through his habitual fibbery, Trump has lost the benefit of any doubt.

But those in the media who haven’t learned how to deal with it are not doing anyone any favors.

Remember the tale of the little boy who cried wolf. Save the histrionics for the real offenses, the ones that mean something real. It is pointless to be as clueless as the president sometimes is.