In the past week, several pundits and alleged "experts" have been on a mission to tell us rubes that Hillary Clinton's email and private-server controversy doesn't rise to the level of being a scandal. They have absurdly argued that even if she "technically" violated State Department protocols and even broke some pesky laws in handling her communications while she was Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton's actions weren't serious enough to warrant prosecution.

In making that argument in an August 27 column ("The Hillary Clinton e-mail ‘scandal’ that isn’t"), Washington Post columnist David Ignatius heavily relied on one Jeffrey Smith without revealing Smith's political connections to Bill and Mrs. Clinton and his professional advocacy on behalf of Democrats. After getting caught, while never recognizing his critics' existence, Ignatius incompletely disclosed Smith's obvious lack of objectivity in a manner which would have been barely tolerable during newspapers' dead-trees era, and which is completely unacceptable in the digital age.

The New York Times continued to spread skepticism about the decision by a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., not to seek criminal charges against a white police officer who shot a black teenager. The Times hypocritically upended its own liberal sensibility by suggesting more prosecutorial zeal would have been a good thing in this particular case. And a lead editorial likened the Ferguson police to "an alien, occupying force that is synonymous with state-sponsored abuse."

James Taranto performed an invaluable service from his Opinion Journal "Best of the Web" perch this week, revealing New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a notorious liberal crusader on various fronts, to be perhaps the most gullible of the paper's many liberal writers. (He's also suggested Mao Tse-Tung and Saddam Hussein weren't that bad.)

Taranto teed up Kristof with this example of corruption of the peer-review process in scientific research:

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal ably summarized the "hindsight and hypocrisy" of the New York Times editorial page. "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Donald Sterling scandal is that virtually no one in the sports world was surprised to hear that Mr. Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, may have been caught on tape spewing racist sentiments," the Times proclaimed.

But apparently, the NBA is responsible for tolerating Sterling's "plantation attitudes" for decades, and somehow The New York Times editorial-page crusaders never before located this American racist menace:

James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal took on the strange conflict that is PolitiFact picked a “Lie of the Year” they’ve repeatedly defended as “Half True.” Barack Obama repeatedly claimed that if you liked your health plan, you could keep it once he passed his badly named "Affordable Care Act." He called it "PolitiFact's Forked Tongue."

PolitiFact has only drawn a yellow Hi-Liter through what’s wrong with liberal media-elite “fact checking” patrols: It exploits their "objective" image as it declares a campaign promise as factual (or not) prematurely, before there’s any factual reality to judge. From the beginning of the “truth squad” tendency in the 1992 presidential campaign, we’ve found this disturbing tendency.