Fresh off his stunt calls for Joe Biden to be drug tested during the debate, Ronny Jackson — the lapsed doctor who turned the White House into a pill mill and covered up Trump’s near-lethal COVID — has made a show of releasing a medical update on Trump’s wound and treatment from the shooting attempt.

This purported medical update is not the first we’ve heard from Jackson about Donald Trump’s ear. Jackson did several media interviews before this, starting with propagandist Maria Bartiromo, a chat which focused far less on a quasi medical description. On July 16, in an interview with far right podcaster Benny, Jackson claimed the bullet didn’t get close enough to Trump’s head to cause any concussive effect. Sometime in the same period, right wing columnist Byron York spoke to Jackson more informally.  Placing himself among that crowd, Jonathan Swan wrote a fawning story from Jackson’s view — confirming that Jackson offered to help Trump “medically or with the press” — mentioning none of the reasons that Jackson’s claims should be approached with skepticism.

So we should assume this “medical report” is about helping Trump with the press as much as it is changing his bandages.

The letter is an excellent test of how well various journalists evaluate credibility of sources — a good proxy for how they treat anonymous sources. You can watch, in real time, whether journalists consider the following before treating a discredited hack like Jackson as a credible source:

• Is he in a position to know what he claims?
• Is the report internally consistent
• Is he otherwise reliable?

For example, according to Jackson’s narrative (and Swan’s report), Jackson was not a witness to the most important detail of the report: what the doctors in Butler, PA determined.

The President was initially treated by the medical staff at Butler Memorial Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania, who did an excellent job of evaluating him and treating his wound. I want to thank them for their outstanding care. They provided a thorough evaluation for additional injuries that included a CT of his head.

Jackson doesn’t know firsthand what their care was like. And Jackson’s reference to possible medical reports, with no substance, should raise questions about why we haven’t heard about the CT results (and why Jackson didn’t mention the CT test when Benny, who remarkably asked a better question than many self-imagined straight journalists, asked him about a concussion).

Crazier still, Jackson sources his knowledge about the bullet trajectory to what was, “reported and witnessed by the entire world, he sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear from a high- powered rifle used by the would be assassin.” Jackson’s description of the wound may well be accurate.

The bullet passed, coming less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear. The bullet track produced a 2 cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear. There was initially significant bleeding, followed by marked swelling of the entire upper ear. The swelling has since resolved, and the wound is beginning to granulate and heal properly. Based on the highly vascular nature of the ear, there is still intermittent bleeding requiring a dressing to be in place. Given the broad and blunt nature of the wound itself, no sutures were required.

But even there, Jackson’s description of the amount of bleeding is second hand (and inconsistent with what videos showed). Swan even described that Jackson had fallen behind his spouse, watching in the next room, as he followed Trump’s speech live. He watched the shooting itself on delay.

Mr. Jackson was in his bedroom in Amarillo, Texas, on Saturday night, packing his bag for the Republican convention. He was watching the Trump rally on his iPad, but he had stopped the livestream a couple of times, so he lagged behind Mr. Trump’s remarks by a couple of minutes. His wife, Jane, was watching the rally on a television in the living room, and she was speaking to someone on the phone. She suddenly called out to him.

“She said, ‘The president just got shot,’” Mr. Jackson recalled.

“And I said, ‘What? No.’”

“She goes, ‘Are you behind?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ And so I fast-forwarded it.”

Having gone an entire week exhibiting little curiosity about Trump’s medical condition, many outlets snapped this up as if it was credible.

WaPo’s Maegan Vazquez offers one of the better mainstream treatments of this. She raises Jackson’s partisan bias, describing Jackson as, “a political ally whose actions as a medical provider have come into question over the years,” in the second paragraph and returns to concerns about Jackson in later paragraphs.

He will have further evaluations, including a comprehensive hearing exam, as needed. He will follow up with his primary care physician, as directed by the doctors that initially evaluated him.

Axios’ Emma Loop, by contrast, basically just cut-and-pasted the one substantive paragraph. The only warning about Jackon’s unreliability was a link to a report on Jackson’s alcohol and personnel abuse, labeled as Axios’ “Go Deeper” category.

That made Loop’s report nearly indistinguishable from the one from an intern that Politico tasked with cutting and pasting the release.

WSJ simply stuck a quote from Jackson at the end of a report on Trump’s Grand Rapids rally, perhaps appropriately sandwiched between the ravings from other Trump groupies. It offered no caution about Jackson’s credibility.

NYT hasn’t covered yesterday’s release at all, perhaps figuring that Swan’s earlier fawning coverage was sufficient.

Perhaps the most important problem with Jackson’s report came from former Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr.

As former President, Trump has available to him the best doctors in the world to evaluate a gunshot wound (and any possible damage to his brain).

According to Jackson, Trump hasn’t even consulted his primary care physician yet, nor has he had his hearing tested.

He will have further evaluations, including a comprehensive hearing exam, as needed. He will follow up with his primary care physician, as directed by the doctors that initially evaluated him.

Rather than having his physician care for this wound, then, Trump had his trusty PR flack do so.

But maybe Trump didn’t need a practicing doctor to care for him. Maybe the wound was so minor Trump needs no day-to-day medical care, he needs only a nurse to change his bandaid.

This certainly looked like a medical report. But what it reported is we still don’t know about results on the tests done in Butler, including the CT scan. And rather than conveying that, Trump has chosen to put his Candy Man on the case.

Update: This Alex Wagner interview with Vin Gupta discusses the kinds of concerns that doctors might have going forward.

Update: And here’s Sanjay Gupta with his questions.