As reliably as night follows day, Bernie Sanders’s Iowa surge has brought another round of lament from Washington’s elite political and media class that the new front-runner has not faced adequate media scrutiny. “They let him get away with murder,” said Matt Bennett of the centrist think tank Third Way, which opposes Sanders’s policy agenda, in a January 27 story emblazoned across the home page of Politico.

The notion that Sanders is sailing toward primary victories with nary a soul bothering to pose a question about his record or electability is a relic of the 2016 Democratic primary, when Hillary Clinton and her supporters grew frustrated with his durable presence in the race and pundits puzzled over the fact that Sanders polled better against Donald Trump. The common explanation settled on was that Sanders’s popularity was a mirage resting on his lack of scrutiny. But it’s hard to square that conventional wisdom with the written record—a compendium of “vetting” so varied and substantial that it raises the question as to whether the people who need vetting the most are those who continue to call for it long after their needs have been met.

The “unvetted” line of attack began early and persisted throughout the entire 2016 campaign. “I think the media is giving Bernie a pass right now,” then Senator Claire McCaskill said on Morning Joe in June 2015, less than two months after Sanders entered the race. “I rarely read in any coverage of Bernie that he’s a socialist.” By September 2015, Correct the Record, a Clinton super PAC led by David Brock, had gone on a spending spree to link Sanders to the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—a tactic that would be used against both Corbyn himself as well as against French socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. A few months later, the same super PAC spent $1 million on online trolls to push back against Sanders’s social media popularity.

In the later months of 2015, the national press coverage briefly shifted its attention, focusing more heavily on horse-race stories than on the candidates’ policy ideas or background. During this period, Clinton received vastly disproportionate media attention, a phenomenon that neither went unnoticed nor unremarked upon. Responding to reader complaints that The New York Times was not covering Sanders equally or fairly, public editor Margaret Sullivan conceded that Clinton had received much more scrutiny, and that the “tone” of Times stories on Sanders was “regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times”—“focusing more on the candidate’s age, appearance and style, rather than what he has to say.”

Over the next six months, however, coverage of Sanders’s record—and negative ad spending against him—returned as a topic of conversation. Already during 2015, both Mother Jones and The New York Times had run long stories on Sanders’s youthful activism, his political writings, and his political career in Vermont. Among other matters, these stories drew attention to a 1972 essay on gender stereotypes Sanders had written that came across as crassly sexist, and which Sanders was subsequently made to disown. (Chelsea G. Summers, vetting Sanders on the pages of The New Republic, focused on this essay at length.) During the October 2015 primary debate, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Sanders, “How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”