By the end of last week, high-profile liberals and members of the political press corps were battling one another in a state of mutual incomprehension.

Many liberals believe that reporters, lead by standard-bearers at The New York Times, have fallen short recently of their institutional duty to accurately inform the public about the candidates and stakes of this election; reporters, along with many of Hillary Clinton’s progressive critics, have responded that liberals are attempting to shield her from their scrutinizing eyes for partisan reasons.

"aggressive investigative journalism against Trump is not enough for Democratic partisans"



https://t.co/9JbTBeKCyM — Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) September 7, 2016

Clinton backers' shaming of the press for reporting anything the Clinton campaign dislikes is rapidly approaching self-parody territory. — Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) September 4, 2016

The participants in the dispute, which continues to this day, include some of the most influential members of the commentariat and the national news media.



In a representative salvo this Monday, Times columnist and Clinton supporter Paul Krugman implicitly criticized his own colleagues, arguing that Trump is “being graded on a curve.”

If he manages to read from a TelePrompter without going off script, he’s being presidential. If he seems to suggest that he wouldn’t round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants right away, he’s moving into the mainstream. And many of his multiple scandals, like what appear to be clear payoffs to state attorneys general to back off investigating Trump University, get remarkably little attention. Meanwhile, we have the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.

In response, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald characterized Krugman’s column as a work of campaign surrogacy rather than fair-minded opinion journalism. “The absolute last metric journalists should use for determining what to cover is the reaction of pundits who, like Krugman and plenty of others, are singularly devoted to the election of one of the candidates,” Greenwald argued. “[T]his emerging narrative that Clinton should not only enjoy the support of a virtually united elite class but also a scrutiny-free march into the White House is itself quite dangerous.”