Hillary’s media is torching its standards to cover the election

Put it this way: With polls showing a tight race, Trump is on track to win at least 50 million votes in the fall. That’s a lot of Americans to dismiss as idiots, rednecks and racists just because you hate their candidate.

Yet the partisan shrillness reflects desperation as much as conviction. Clinton, viewed as inevitable from the start, just as she was in 2008, is having trouble putting Trump away and is actually sliding backwards in key areas. Her slump suggests that the media’s nonstop bashing of the GOP nominee — in their news and opinion pages — is yielding diminishing returns and might be backfiring.

With no end in sight of the drip-drip-drip of bad news about Clinton’s e-mails and the growing evidence of a slipshod FBI investigation, the new efforts to help her carry a heightened sense of urgency.

The editorial in The Washington Post was especially striking. Headlined “The Hillary Clinton EMail Story is Out of Control,” the paper lamented that Lauer and most other journalists still find the subject newsworthy. It called the stories much ado over a “minor e-mail scandal,” and insisted coverage “has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.”