CBS’s Late Show host Stephen Colbert took another turn into the gutter on Wednesday night to the glee of his liberal audience as he joked that Mitt Romney consuming frog legs while having dinner the evening prior with President-elect Donald Trump “taste[d] a little bit like Trump's balls” and so began a brief rift joking Romney had performed oral sex on Trump.

Considering that it's coming from the New York Times, reporter Sabrina Tavernise's account of what happened in Ohio to swing it from a close Obama win in 2012 to a near-blowout for Donald Trump in 2016 was reasonably well-done, but still had glaring flaws. Her story's human interest elements were strong, but the accompanying statistics provided were sparse, and really needed to be there to tell the full tale. Tavernise's biggest failures were first, not describing how historically large Trump's Buckeye State victory margin was, and second, neglecting to attribute a large portion of that margin to sharply lower overall turnout among Democrats. Those two elements enabled her to avoid entertaining the possibility that Ohio — but to be clear, not necessarily the rest of the nation, or even the Midwest — may have just experienced a potentially seismic electoral realignment.

On Friday's Real Time on HBO, far left host Bill Maher seemed to be in a panic over the possibility that Donald Trump will be elected President, as he repeatedly hit on his worries that there is a "slow-moving, right-wing coup" that will bring to power a "fascist" President Trump, even going so far as to invoke the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Maher even ended up admitting that he and other liberals "cried wolf" in their attacks on President George W. Bush and GOP candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain, calling it a "big mistake" on their part.

This is a volatile election year, to say the least. The two major-party candidates are far less than perfect, routinely commit gaffes (or perceived gaffes), and have been hurt by a variety of negative disclosures and actions. Two other challengers have gained a degree of attention and apparent support not seen since Ross Perot's presidential runs in the 1990s. Meanwhile, mistrust of the establishment press is at or near an all-time high, and several journalists have publicly decided that the idea of even trying (or pretending) to report in a fair and balanced manner is not appropriate this year.

Unlike a lot of his fellow liberals, Jonathan Chait doesn’t believe presidential-debate moderators should be on-camera fact-checkers, but Chait’s reason for opposing the idea is unambiguously anti-conservative. In an item posted a few hours prior to Monday night’s Clinton-Trump clash, Chait argued that the way Republicans dealt with Candy Crowley’s intervention in a 2012 Romney-Obama debate “suggests the party would never tolerate such a role by the media on an ongoing basis,” given that “the GOP exists within an epistemic bubble that creates its own reality and disregards the findings of mainstream experts in economics, science, and other fields…Conservatives created this alternate ecosystem precisely to insulate their side from scrutiny from journalists who were not working within the conservative movement. And the simple reality is that, if debates become forums for media to subject candidate claims to fact-checking by the standards of independent arbiters, Republicans will refuse to participate in them.”