This past week, I started to notice a disturbing trend among my liberal friends on Facebook. It started with shared links and posts saying "this is getting downright scary" but quickly escalated to heads exploding – all over my newsfeed. Like any good Republican, I love carnage – but not when it's my friends.

Much of the cranial matter yesterday was the result of multiple news stories claiming that Trump had imposed a gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency as well as various other agencies. To be fair, it came from what is generally viewed as a reliable source. As far as I can tell, it started with a breaking news tweet from the Associated Press, and since the AP is a newswire, it got picked up by The Los Angeles Times and various other news outlets around the country. Heck, even Fox News got in the game.

The problem is that the gag-order story – like a lot of news stories these days – is really a mischaracterization. Here's the reality. These memos, which were portrayed by the press as unprecedented control over agency communications, are actually standard procedure for whenever we have a new administration. Having lived in Washington through four administration transitions, (which makes me feel really old), I can assure you, this is a normal state of affairs.

And there's a reason that this happens. When a new party comes into power, there is a lag between the Inauguration and Senate confirmation for agency heads and political appointees. It doesn't really make sense for an agency to be putting out press releases, tweets and "scientific" reports when they haven't even had time to put the "W's" back on their keyboards. I think we can all agree that when a Democrat leaves office and a Republican comes in, it takes a certain period of time to take down the rainbow unicorn website and put up the party of darkness website. These are just facts. Real facts – not even alternative facts.

Not every news outlet got it wrong. The New York Times interviewed three different longtime career employees who all seemed a bit mystified by the reporting. "I've lived through many transitions, and I don't think this is a story," said a senior EPA career official. "This is standard practice." In a similar piece, Science magazine interviewed an official at a U.S. Agricultural Research Service, who said the memo, the magazine wrote, was "a poorly-worded effort by career officials – not anyone appointed by Trump – to remind employees of a longstanding U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) policy on clearing statements that have policy relevance with senior officials before releasing them." He went on to say that they essentially used the same memo that was used when Tom Vilsack took over the agency in 2009.

Unfortunately, by the time facts started to come out – the AP breaking news tweet and the CNN, Fox and Politico stories were all over social media, resulting in, let's face it, a whole lot of wasted anger. Instead of finding ways to compare the so-called gag order to propaganda techniques used by various dictators throughout history – you could have been highjacking a crane in D.C. and hoisting a flag that said RESIST on it. Oh wait – you did do that. Good job multitaskers!

You might be wondering, why would I care if the press is misreporting something about a guy who lies anyway? Because stories like this breed mistrust and create unsubstantiated fear. And that, my friends, is how we got to where we are now.