https://www.wired.com/story/should-political-reporters-be-quarantined-from-covering-covid-19/

If the coronavirus pandemic becomes for Donald Trump what Hurricane Katrina was for George W. Bush, we might come to look back at last Friday’s press conference as Trump’s “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” moment. The president’s comments to reporters at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta were, as my colleague Adam Rogers has masterfully explained, riddled with bizarre and dangerous falsehoods. One stood out above the rest: Trump’s flatly untrue claim that “anybody that wants a test can get a test.” The president was either lying about or ignorant of the central fact of the US government’s botched response to the disease. That alone could have been front-page news: “Trump Falsely Declares ‘Anybody That Wants’ Can Get a Coronavirus Test.”

Yet here’s how The New York Times, our paper of record, initially covered the claim: It didn’t. The paper’s report on Trump’s press conference didn’t even mention the tests comment at first; later, a reference was added, without explaining that the statement was false. Instead, the article, by a White House reporter, made Trump sound downright presidential, focusing on his effort to project calm. In print, it ran with the headline “‘It Will End’: Trump Urges Nation to Avoid Panicking.”