I was just reading about Trump’s complaining about the timing of the debates, and the article quoted Trump as saying he’d received a letter from the NFL complaining about it. The article noted that the NFL denied ever sending him a letter, but made nothing of it. It struck me that this is quite common—Trump lies about everything, the media just lets it slide.

Remember back in 2000 when all Al Gore had to do was to confuse which of 17 trips he had gone on with the FEMA director and everyone called him an insufferable liar, with the media questioning his integrity and electability?

Now Donald Trump makes up lies literally every single day, and it’s just kind of glossed over.
Standards have changed, haven’t they?

Oh no, wait—you know who is branded an insufferable liar? Hillary. No one even doubts that, including so many on the left. Despite the fact that sources like Politifact actually found that she has been the most honest of all the candidates this year. And yet, the Washington Post declares, “Hillary Clinton has a major honesty problem,” the Baltimore Sun proclaims, “Hillary Clinton’s lies can’t survive the age of social media,” and the Boston Globe says that Hillary deserves her special standard. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the right-wing media… while a search for Trump and Honesty not only yields fewer results, but many of them are headlines parroting Trump’s statements about Hillary’s honesty.

Why does this happen? The answer lies in the media.

In an objective media, Trump would have more than ten times the headlines proclaiming issues with his honesty, let alone his other faults. But the media has long been cowed by conservatives into finding an “equivalency,” where they must be equally critical of both sides, even if the one on the right is a hundred times worse, or else face scathing attacks for being a “Liberal Media.” Remember the boast, “Without Fear or Favor”? So much for that—the media cowers in fear at any such charge; the right wing has “worked the ref” so thoroughly that honesty and objectivity are long forgotten memories of the institution that we depend on for accurate information.