The approach is inseparable from the web era. No matter how bad a Trump blunder, someone can be found overreacting to it or otherwise losing their cool on social media. In fact, social-media feeds disproportionately expose us to the most over-the-top takes, making it seem as if they reflect the median reaction even when that is far from true.

That illusion is exploited by commentators like Tucker Carlson. He recently declared:

Many journalists believe it’s literally impossible to be unfair to Donald Trump or the people who work for him. Extremism in the pursuit of Trump is no vice. That’s the view in newsrooms, and you hear it in conversations all around Washington, a city that voted 91 percent for Hillary Clinton last fall.

There are newspaper articles, TV segments, and tweets that are unfair to the Trump administration. But Carlson’s claim is much more sweeping than that—indeed, he indulges in just the sort of careless hyperbole that he is alleging. For there are not many journalists who believe that it’s “literally impossible” to be unfair to Trump or the people who work for him. Every major newsroom in America is awash in emailed allegations against Trump and his associates that are false and never see print for that reason, even as some of the harshest criticism of Trump that does find its way into print comes from the very people who work for him, albeit anonymously.

Worse than the inaccuracies in Carlson’s language are the inadequacies of his mode. “Media figures, adults, smart people who have been around, have perspective, or did have perspective,” he writes. “They’ve succumbed to Trump hatred that is so intense, it has destroyed their judgment and in some cases affected their character.” Again, there are outliers who resemble this description. But Carlson inflates their importance, treats them as representative of Trump critics, and operates as if attacks on Trump are so unusually unhinged and unfair as to be a matter of newsworthiness equal to or even greater than the substance of Trump’s presidency.

Here he is quoting a Fox News colleague:

.@brithume: We're in the most poisonous atmosphere towards a President in my life time. I have not seen anything like this #Tucker @FoxNews — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 17, 2017

Brit Hume is 73. He lived through JFK’s assassination. And the notion that he has not seen any atmosphere as poisonous as opposition to Trump isn’t just ahistorical. A skeptic out to disprove it needn’t even look farther back than the recent past. Eight years ago, Glenn Beck responded to Barack Obama’s election by spending years literally sketching conspiracy theories on chalk boards—all on Fox News, where Hume works. Try finding a CNN clip about Trump that is more unhinged than this:

Rush Limbaugh told his audience that it would be okay for black children to beat up white children in Barack Obama’s America. Donald Trump himself embarked on a quest to prove that Obama was a foreign usurper—a secret Kenyan in the White House. All of these figures were household names with platforms as big as any in broadcasting. Surveying Republicans at the local level revealed even more poisonous behavior.