Lessons from Election 2020 & COVID-19: It Took a Pandemic to Teach Us All a Lesson…On Privileging the Lie

About a month into a nation-wide shutdown, Time Magazine editor Tom Weber tweeted out a series of CNN screenshots that caught my eye. In each one, the President was giving his usual briefing, but the headline revealed something else going on.

Today, two days after the still contested Presidential election, Trump is at it again, claiming voter fraud in the ballots that states are counting. He has at press time, sued the states of Michigan and Georgia to stop the vote counts. Both cases have been denied and the counting goes on. And so does Trump, giving grand speeches and posting tweets about fraud and stating that has already won the election.

Check out the headlines. This is a departure from the policies dictating Trump’s falsehoods when reporting them in the news cycle. Prior to these, the headlines were very different.

Instead of addressing the inaccuracies in his speech — that the response was going well and the government acted appropriately at the beginning of the epidemic — the station simply labels the briefing. The pundits later took down…