I can see why President Trump warns us about the liberal media. I was watching the Vice President’s acceptance speech on PBS last night, and it sounded like a fairy tale about a wise king who defended his subjects from the dreaded coronavirus, and yet they broadcast this as news. Shouldn’t PBS give us a warning? “The speech you are about to hear is delivered in the genre of a fairy tale”?

In this fairy tale the King immediately sealed the borders of the United States to prevent the dreaded virus from infecting his subjects. What I recall is that only Chinese nationals were kept out, and American citizens were allowed to return home. Meanwhile European travelers moved at will across the Atlantic. The strain of the virus that infected the East Coast seemed to link us to the white peoples’ coronavirus. But the West Coast got its share.

In this fairy tale the King took immediate action to combat the virus with abundant PPE and ventilators, and not one subject who needed a ventilator lacked one.  And yet I remember two months of our leader declaring it was not a pandemic, but a mild flu which would vanish suddenly. I remember doctors in New York stating that they were making hard choices about who needed the ventilator more, which sounds like someone who needed one did not get it.

And I remember once our king recognized the presence of the pandemic, he gave it six  weeks to get out town, by Easter Sunday, as it happened.  And even though he said it quite sternly, the coronavirus was undaunted and continued to spread in spurts throughout the summer. And I remember that the supplies of PPE were shared by governors by their own initiatives with the King practicing laissez-faire.

I don’t know why PBS broadcast this bedtime story from Vice President Mike Pence as if it were actual news. It certainly taught me to keep alert for media bias, as President Trump has urged.  Maybe PBS had been misinformed that the Vice President would be reporting the facts about the coronavirus, and they were caught off guard.

If so, I hope they will be wiser when the President gives his acceptance speech. The President has been known to mix genres when he speaks. He occasionally dips into comedy or Twitter-speak in his delivery. Sometimes we find out he was only kidding the next day.

But PBS could offer a few warnings, so we don’t take everything literally or assume they take responsibility for the accuracy of the content.  If the President tells a few whoppers tonight I want to be prepared.