Even before Trump went ahead and offered advice likely to be fatal—in one case, a nurse was convicted of murder for injecting bleach in dialysis patients—he’d repeatedly told the public to rely on treatments that weren’t backed by science and posed dangers of their own.
The supposed coronavirus treatment Trump has hyped most aggressively, calling it a “game-changer,” is hydroxychloroquine. It leads to increased deaths, a recent study shows. “What do you have to lose?” Trump had asked. Science answered: your life. This answer came after a top vaccine development expert was fired for pushing back against the push to use hydroxychloroquine before it had been fully studied.
But the cable news networks keep airing Trump’s press briefings, only sometimes cutting away when he goes off the rails in especially spectacular fashion. And the newspapers keep reporting them according to what Trump says, with a headline of his claims followed, if we’re lucky, by weak-sauce rebuttals by experts. That makes the media complicit in compromising public trust.
