It’s all about controlling the narrative. And in pursuit of controlling the narrative, the media is…

1. Lying compulsively about Trump

2. Trying to cut off presidential briefings during a crisis

The first is expected. The second is obscene.

Here the New York Times offers both.

He has also encouraged the use of medications that have yet to be proved effective against the virus; on Monday, a man in Arizona died after he and his wife consumed a form of chloroquine, a drug that Mr. Trump has promoted on the air.

The media is pushing this false claim repeatedly. The Arizona couple took fish cleaner. Not a prescribed medication. The Times, like the rest of the media, fails to mention this while pursuing its political narrative. And that’s what this is about. Maintaining media supremacy.

“I would stop putting those briefings on live TV — not out of spite, but because it’s misinformation,” the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow declared to her viewers last week.

The Times is quoting a conspiracy theorist who pushed nonsense and lies to her viewers for years about misinformation.

If knows about misinformation, it’s Maddow.

The White House, in turn, has been critical of TV networks that do not do its bidding. On Monday, after CNN and MSNBC cut away from the final portion of Mr. Trump’s briefing, a White House spokesman, Judd Deere, called the move “pretty disgraceful.”

CNN responded that the network “will make our own editorial decisions.” MSNBC said it had cut away only “because the information no longer appeared to be valuable to the important ongoing discussion around public health.”

The pivot has only been getting stronger.

staffers and managers at CNN and MSNBC have been treating the briefings with increasing caution. 

Going forward, they said, they will be ready to cut away from the briefings when newsworthy facts and figures—usually shared by federal public-health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci—give way to unsupported presidential speculation and outright falsehoods.

“We might take it from the top and then cut away after the first lie, and return when the lies stop,” said one cable-network producer.

Which is to say they’re going to try to argue with President Trump, live, while manipulating the narrative in real time.

Meanwhile an NPR affiliate is going all in.

KUOW Public Radio, which provides news for the Seattle and Tacoma area, announced on Tuesday they will no longer be airing President Trump’s daily coronavirus task force press conference.

The station said they will be keeping track of what is being said, but “we will not be airing the briefings live due to a pattern of false or misleading information provided that cannot be fact checked in real time.”

It’s not the job of the media to “fact check” press briefings in real time.

This is public radio in a hot zone announcing that it won’t provide the public with coronavirus task force briefings.