Their abandonment of the standards for fairness and accuracy is completely willful. They find themselves indignant by the looseness with which Mr. Trump says certain things. Most egregious was their hysteria over a sentence fragment about what Second Amendment advocates might or might not do in response to Mrs. Clinton’s attacks on the amendment. The MSM insisted he was encouraging violence. Among mature adults that response was considered preposterous.

The MSM is aroused by Mr. Trump’s words but unbothered about actions that Mrs. Clinton has actually taken. They seem to think that Mr. Trump’s misfired jokes or loosely formulated statements are more dangerous to the commonweal than Mrs. Clinton’s decisions with her emails and her mendacious cover-ups.

Evidence of what FBI Director James Comey called Mrs. Clinton’s “extremely careless” mishandling of classified documents does not arouse the MSM’s sense of alarm. Even evidence of repeated conflict of interest in her co-mingling of Foundation work and State Department work does not trouble the MSM. Their aphorism is not that actions speak louder than words but that words are more alarming than actions