Norah O’Donnell sat across from the president of the United States days after a gunman tried to kill him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and chose to read aloud, on camera, the assassin’s manifesto. The passage called Trump a pedophile and a rapist. She then asked for his reaction.

Trump called her a disgrace. The clip went everywhere.

The media’s defense — that O’Donnell was simply asking about a document in the public record — holds up for about thirty seconds before collapsing. There is a difference between reporting that a manifesto exists and its general character, and reading its most inflammatory accusations directly into the face of the person targeted by an attempted murder. One is journalism. The other is theater designed to force a specific response.