On Friday a journalist reported that within hours of Donald Trump moving into the White House, the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. that sat in the Oval Office had been removed.

It was entirely fake. And it didn’t come from some fringe source either. It was posted on social media by a TIME magazine reporter.

The reporter realized it was a mistake and subsequently issued an apology. But not before many people had taken it as truth and other reporters repeated it.

This minor incident is a window into exactly what liberal media bias is and why it’ll only worsen in the months ahead.

The subtext to this false news item would of course have been taken to mean Trump immediately ordered the removal of a depiction of America’s most revered civil rights leader. It was symbolism: Trump’s turning back the dial on civil rights.

This screw-up seems to have happened because the reporter simply couldn’t see the bust because it was obscured by someone standing in front of it.

Why didn’t he ask someone where it was? (He eventually did.) Why the rush to post something that would so obviously cause a scene?

And here’s where we get to the root cause of liberal media bias, whether it was at play in this specific instance or not. The problem isn’t so much that reporters are simply making things up.

No, the problem is that when it comes to, say, Obama, they are naturally predisposed to viewing everything he does in the most generous light possible. Whereas they interpret everything Trump does and says in the worst possible way.

For example, there are female executives who’ve worked under Trump and mostly applaud his treatment of women in the workplace. Some were even better paid than men in similar posts.

Then there are stories about how the White House under Obama was something of a sexist place -- where men had the top jobs and were paid better than women.

Yet none of these anecdotes were elevated to anywhere near the same heights as other anecdotes of equal weight that paint Trump as horrible. This is because they don’t fit the narrative.

Now even the most dogged Trump supporter has to agree the president is needlessly petty. Quibbling over the number of attendees at an inauguration ceremony is a waste of time.

But you can at least understand why Trump and his press secretary were frustrated at the attendance story and the MLK one. They’re faced with one torqued story after the other.

Will the over-the-top media bias calm down? You decide. Here’s a tweet issued on inauguration day by Doug Saunders, a staff columnist for The Globe & Mail:

“If you thought you'd never see anything on TV as frightening as 9/11, this was it. But the consequences of this are far more damaging”.

You can’t make this stuff up. A writer for Canada’s supposed paper of record considers Trump’s presidency as frightening as a terrorist attack that killed thousands. The bias is clear, to put it mildly.

It takes two to tango. Trump has without a doubt stoked the flames in many of these wars. But the media does everything it can to make it worse.

The new president is going to have to learn to pick his battles. Even though it’s clear many in the media won’t do the same.