What to call the pandemic sweeping across the world has become the subject of peculiar political, press, and pundit focus. At press briefings this week, President Trump has doubled down on calling the virus at the heart of the pandemic “the Chinese virus.” Richard Engel at NBC News labeled this racist. “This is a virus that came from the territory of China but came from bats. This is a bat virus, not a China virus. It doesn’t speak Chinese,” he lectured.

Freelance writer Jeryl Bier has collected a series of screenshots of media outlets, the Atlantic and the New York Times, for example, condemning as racist the moniker Chinese virus or Wuhan virus after Trump used the phrase, despite having used the same phrasing previously. Likewise, Vox headlined an article “Trump’s new fixation on using a racist name for the coronavirus is dangerous” despite having called the new sickness “the Wuhan coronavirus” themselves multiple times. The World Health Organization has also engaged in its own naming debate, finally settling on COVID-19, as well as its fair share of political hypocrisy.