"I am very scared," writes Paul Krugman, winner of a Nobel prize in economics, in a brief, salient blog post this morning. He believes media companies are "objectively pro-Trump."

It’s not even false equivalence: compare the amount of attention given to the Clinton Foundation despite absence of any evidence of wrongdoing, and attention given to Trump Foundation, which engaged in more or less open bribery — but barely made a dent in news coverage. Clinton was harassed endlessly over failure to give press conferences, even though she was doing lots of interviews; Trump violated decades of tradition by refusing to release his taxes, amid strong suspicion that he is hiding something; the press simply dropped the subject.

The New Republic's Brian Beutler argues "reporters and media organizations are far more concerned with things like transparency, the treatment of reporters, and first-in-line access to information of public interest, than they are with other forms of democratic accountability." They're also in the business of clicks and eyeballs.

Citing Beutler's piece, Krugman writes:

Brian Beutler argues that it’s about protecting the media’s own concerns, namely access. But I don’t think that works. It doesn’t explain why the Clinton emails were a never-ending story but the disappearance of millions of George W. Bush emails wasn’t, or for that matter Jeb Bush’s deletion of records; the revelation that Colin Powell did, indeed, offer HRC advice on how to have private email the way he did hasn’t even been reported by some major news organizations.

The New York Times's public editor Liz Spayd started all this self-scrutiny over the weekend, writing: "The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking. What the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates."

Today, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo calls Spayd's argument "a classic strawman," criticizes the Times's coverage of the Clinton Foundation, and goes on to say:

A good, though rather parodic and extreme example of the kind of both-sides-ism we're talking about was the spate of headlines which said some version of "Trump, Clinton Trade Charges of Racism" a couple weeks ago. Well, one candidate has openly identified with avowed racists, made racially incendiary remarks and made racism the single most salient theme of his campaign. The other ... well, there's really nothing like that besides Trump saying 'No, you're racist.' This isn't a moral or ideological judgment. It is, as far as we can ever have it, a factual statement of what's actually happening.

We live in depressing times. Either you have in-the-tank biases (and admittedly, The Stranger is full of in-the-tank biases), or you have b.s. "both-sides-ism."

How is the latter any different than watching TV ads volley back and forth? Speaking of which—here's the latest back-and-forth volley of TV ads.