For more than a year, the national news media have held up the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its director, Rochelle Walensky, as paragons of public health. It’s no coincidence they suddenly had a moment of clarity when the CDC adjusted its pandemic protocols.

This epiphany is happening primarily at CNN, with ratio king Chris Cillizza coming around to reality on Twitter and declaring that catching COVID isn’t a moral failing and blue staters, journalists and Democratic politicians doing so shouldn’t be shamed (The Washington Post made a similar statement).

On Sunday, CNN hall monitors Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy actually went after the CDC, saying it appears the agency has become “a punchline.” That segment also featured Dr. Lucy McBride, who warned that some medical professionals are fanning the flames of panic, with accompanying chyrons such as “Is the media out of touch with the country about COVID?” and “COVID and the doomsday-doctor problem.”

No doubt it’s a good thing that CNN’s worst actors have suddenly come around to what CDC skeptics have been saying for more than a year and face consequences for waiting so long. The last guy to figure things out has finally figured things out.

Yet to save Stelter, Darcy and their network any more embarrassment, let me put it bluntly: The CDC lost the faith of the American people in 2020 when business owners were forced to stay home and parents were forced to pull their kids out of school, yet social-justice demonstrators and leftist activists were permitted to flood the streets in protest. You weren’t allowed to open your business, but they were allowed to burn it down.

Since then, amid this overnight changing of “the science” with little to explain it other than President Joe Biden’s poll numbers, mainstream media members have suddenly changed their tune on never-ending pandemic measures. Simply put: The writing is on the wall for the upcoming midterm elections, and they are making their adjustments accordingly at the behest of an administration flailing over its broken promise to “shut down the virus.”

The media’s sudden about-face is not because they agree with those on the opposite side of the political aisle. Stelter and others are simply trying to moderate their message now that “the good ones” are starting to catch COVID. This is about hierarchy. Journalists and Democrats are experiencing the same draconian-lite measures that the rest of the country has had to go through for the past year, and they are finding them very inconvenient, both to their own lives and to Biden’s approval ratings.

This appears to be a warning shot across the bow to the CDC and Walensky, who are primed to take the fall as Team Biden dramatically shifts its COVID messaging in the coming weeks. The problem for CNN and Stelter is that this attempt looks politicized, forced and completely cynical. Probably because it is.

Stephen L. Miller is a contributing editor to Spectator World, where a version of this piece first appeared.