Over the past two months, President Donald Trump has claimed that the novel coronavirus was “totally under control” and limited to only “one person coming in from China”; was “pretty much” shut down; would be gone by April; was “very much under control” and not a threat to the stock market; was limited to just 15 people in the U.S. which would be down to zero “within a couple of days”; will “disappear one day … like a miracle”; will have a vaccine ready within “months”; and will “go away” on its own, along with claims that “anybody who wants a test gets a test” and that Americans were being tested for COVID-19 upon reentry to the U.S.

Every single one of these statements was either misleading or flat-out false, but as this crisis has gone on, many media outlets have been functioning as vessels for Trump’s misinformation to reach the general public. More than three years into his presidency and many, many thousands of lies later, journalists continue to cover Trump in the same ways they would cover a head of state with a far more reliable track record for telling the truth.

One would hope this would improve as time progressed, but even over the past few days, media have remained committed to broadcasting misinformation.

During Trump’s March 13 White House Rose Garden press conference about the administration’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Trump made a number of false and otherwise dubious claims, just as he does virtually any time he addresses the public.

At one point, Trump argued that he was not at all responsible for the government’s lack of testing for the virus, instead placing blame on the Obama administration for leaving Trump with a “set of circumstances” that slowed the government’s response. Several news outlets would debunk this false claim after the fact, but ABC News tweeted his response word-for-word, despite it being untrue.