What does it tell us, my students ask, that nine years after Donald Trump oozed down the golden escalator and into contention as Leader of the Free World, the American press, mainstream edition, is still arguing about how to cover him?

Once the charge was that he gets millions of dollars in free media because reporters obsessively overcovers him; now it’s that he gets a free ride because they have outrage fatigue. If you fact-check his lies, you risk spreading them further; if you don’t, you are normalizing nonsense. Round and round the arguments go, especially now that reporters must weigh how to cover the first criminal trial of a former President, a campaign conducted from a courtroom where voters once again are judge and jury.

James Madison defended even a young, sloppy, partisan press as a “great bulwark of liberty” and you can feel in the growing attacks on press performance an urgent, underlying “do better; this election is too important to screw up.” Conservatives for years have flayed the “lamestream” press as arrogant and agenda-driven but political independents' faith in the media has also dropped rather precipitously and according to Gallup, for the first time more Americans say they have no trust at all in the press than say they have a great deal or a fair amount.

Read More: Is America in Decline?

In fact, these days the most indignant denunciations........

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