Some of this refusal to accept a more complicated set of facts than cartoon villainy on the part of the Trump administration is simply partisanship, and conservatives are certainly not immune from cherry-picking which facts are too good to check. But liberals cannot claim to be for truth only when they are calling out Trump’s lies. Refusing to acknowledge error in the face of new evidence further debases the truth they purport to hold dear. Liberals can at least argue that they erred based on the reporting of credible news organizations, which overwhelmingly ran with the story that the park was cleared for a Trump photo-op. But this defense actually compounds the problem: That this was so widely misreported by avowedly nonpartisan publications, which in many cases have high editorial standards, sows distrust in the media and our institutions. It is by now a cliché to say “This is how we got Trump,” but that’s only because this distrust was surely a factor. The eagerness of much of the media to amplify stories that reflect negatively on Trump has made nearly half the country more skeptical of such reporting. And it is indeed stories. This latest incident is no exception — just last week a similar failure was revealed in the reporting on the possibility that Covid-19 may have originated in a Chinese laboratory.