That Hillary Clinton's White House hopes were stunted at least in part by an unfair news media is a conviction that continues to burn strong with her hardcore believers, even as the rest of us know that, like Santa, the Easter Bunny, and Chris Cillizza's political insight, it isn't real.

Complaints about the media as it relates to Clinton resurfaced this week after a New York Times reporter defended his paper's coverage in 2016.

Critics bombarded New York Times White House Correspondent Glenn Thrush on Monday after he shared a news article on Twitter about the Secret Service running out of money to pay its staff due to President Trump and his immediate family's frequent traveling.

"Trump's gilded lifestyle is bankrupting the Secret Service," Thrush tweeted.

Trump's gilded lifestyle is bankrupting the Secret Service -- @bykevinj https://t.co/lOCfKaJdYm — Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) August 21, 2017

One person sarcastically replied to Thrush, "But the emails," a reference to news coverage of Clinton's private email server throughout the election.

Thrush responded by publishing a series of tweets mocking the critique and pointed out other elements of Clinton's campaign that cost her votes, including her uninspiring speeches, her lack of trying in swing-state Wisconsin, and the server itself.

It's not persuasive to Clinton fanatics to argue that she ran a lazy campaign against an inexperienced celebrity businessman who everyone expected to lose. Her supporters instead cling to the absurd notion that the national media was mean to her.

"Seriously, the Times needs to hire an outside investigator to look at the 2016 election the way it did the run-up to Iraq War," liberal writer Joan Walsh wrote in response to Thrush. "Or else its best reporters will lose credibility in Twitter beefs trying to 'balance' Times bad email coverage with Clinton flaws."

Democratic activist Peter Daou accused Thrush of rehashing "every stale mainstream narrative about 2016."

It's not as though harping about the media's Clinton coverage is some new and unexplored idea.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt said in May that the media "failed to distinguish a subject that sounded important — secret emails! — from subjects that were in reality more important." He called his own paper's coverage "the media's worst mistake in 2016."

The liberal Mother Jones publication accused the New York Times of an "epic Hillary Clinton screw-up."

Clinton herself has been complaining about the media for years. Three months ago, she said the New York Times covered her email server controversy "like it was Pearl Harbor."

But the actual reporting was fairly unremarkable.

"Hillary Clinton used personal email account at State Dept., possibly breaking rules," said the headline on the New York Times article that broke the story in 2015.

From there on, news trickled out about her team having deleted 33,000 emails from the server, that a small private company managed the server, and that it was kept in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home basement.

Federal investigators got involved. Then-FBI Director James Comey held a press conference to call Clinton's communications practice "extremely careless." Anthony Weiner was implicated.

Precisely none of these things were done to Clinton by the media. But Joan Walsh thinks the Times should appoint a Sept. 11-style commission to investigate its coverage.

While the nation's former top diplomat was under federal investigation for her "extremely careless" communications practices (that spinning sound is Walsh rolling her eyes), Trump was skating by a distracted media all the way to the finish line.

Wait, that's not right.

CNN was actually playing the infamous "pussy" tape on an endless loop, reporters were feverishly looking for his tax returns, and every news article called Trump a bigot.

Other headlines Trump saw throughout the campaign: "Donald Trump mocks reporter's disability," CBS News ( a lie); "In 1927, Donald Trump's father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens," Washington Post ( deceitful); "Donald Trump: Ban all Muslim travel to U.S.," CNN (okay, that one was true and his proposal was popular).

Ask anyone if they'd rather run a campaign dogged by coverage over an email server or a campaign against any of the scrutiny Trump faced, and the answer is obvious.

The media's 2016 coverage was slanted — in Clinton's favor. And she still lost.

Eddie Scarry is a media reporter for the Washington Examiner.