No Comparison

News broke Monday that Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's top aide, would separate from her husband, former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner. Weiner made headlines, once again, for "sexting" a woman who is not his wife. Evidently having suffered enough humiliation, Abedin called it quits.

Within hours, Maggie Haberman, a superb The New York Times reporter and frequent target of Donald Trump's media gripes, wondered if Weiner's dalliances were fair game, given the scrutiny of Trump's new campaign chief, Steve Bannon. On Twitter, Haberman said: "The problem for Clinton team – after Democrats repeatedly pointed to Bannon's personal past, going to be hard to argue Weiner is off limits."

This otherwise crackerjack journalist was doing something we have seen frequently in media coverage of the 2016 election: Reporters searching, and searching, for equivalence between the candidates where, in most ways, there is virtually none.

For one thing, Weiner is the spouse of a candidate's staffer. Bannon is a candidate's chief. For more, consider this.

In last week's cascade of news stories, it was revealed that Bannon evaded paying hundreds of thousands in federal taxes in the 1990s; attacked his ex-wife, according to divorce filings; argued against his daughters going to school with "whiny brat" Jews, his ex-wife said; fired a woman while she was on maternity leave, according to a suit; sexually harrassed another women, according to another suit; bullied scientists while overseeing the Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona; and, as head of Breitbart News, led a conservative media enterprise lavishly subsidized by a little-known Egyptian businessman.

Most damning, politically, was a report last week by The Guardian that found that Bannon did not live in the house noted on his Florida voter file. In other words, the man charged with directing the Trump campaign may have engaged in the very crime Trump has said could lead to his defeat: voter fraud.

Yes, something's wrong with Anthony Weiner. Very, very wrong. His smart phone should be forever taken away as penance. But compared to Steve Bannon, Weiner is bush league.

But this search for equivalence where there is virtually none continues. Indeed, it is endemic to our media. Campaign reporters spend so much time conveying Trump's countless self-inflicted wounds they end up seeing their coverage as one-sided. This professional yearning for "balance," as we call it, is exacerbated in turn by Trump's complaining of unfair treatment. Put them together and you have last week's media debacle.

I'm talking about the non-scandal at the Clinton Foundation. I won't retrace the the contours of the AP story at the heart of it all except to say that the best the AP could do to tell a tale of power and corruption was to feature as its villain a Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist who'd known Clinton for 30 years.

Most people now believe the AP botched the story. Except the AP. As CNN's Dylan Byers wrote Friday, Clinton may be surrounded by the smoke of controversy, but "finding the fire – the lie, the misdeed, the unethical act – is proving to be rather difficult."

Other reporting by the AP puts flesh on my contention that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not the same and should not be treated as equals in media reports. One is running a presidential campaign while the other is – well, no one is really sure.

Last Tuesday, the AP's Jeff Horwitz reported examining the social media of 50 current and former Trump campaign employees. (About 70 are drawing salaries, down from 120 last summer.) He found seven "expressed views that were overtly racially charged, supportive of violent action or broadly hostile to Muslims."

Staffers mocked Mexican accents, declared Islam "a barbaric cult," called for the hanging of Secretary of State John Kerry, and laughed at a video of a black man eating chicken while belittling blacks for ignorance, laziness and "having too many children."

Trump employees posted fake statistics of black-on-white crime, dire warnings about Sharia law and memes about Muslims buying guns. Horwitz wrote: "The meme said people should be forced to eat bacon before they can purchase firearms."

Meanwhile, Horwitz examined the images attached to over 19,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by Russian hackers for signs of racism or bigotry among Clinton's 650 campaign staffers. He found "nothing of note."

After Clinton last week excoriated Trump for appealing to America's dark side, as Robert Kennedy called it, Trump hit back, saying she was the real bigot. Predictably, many in our media reported the news as tit-for-tat, a volley between equals.

But they are not.

One of these candidates hires as his head honcho a tax-evading, sex-harassing, power-abusing, vote-defrauding wife beater who profits from the largess of a rich Egyptian while defaming adolescent Jews. One of these candidates calls for the "extreme vetting" of Muslim immigrants, but can't properly vet people whose backgrounds would be deadly to any other candidacy.

That candidate is not Hillary Clinton.