Much of the liberal media went into panic mode, declaring that this particular exercise of the First Amendment is actually an attack on the First Amendment. The reason why liberal editors are so distraught that independent conservative journalists are publishing evidence of the racist, anti-semitic, and otherwise vile sentiments expressed by their “objective” employees comes down, as it usually does, to power.

There are many journalists in the profession not to inform the public, but to gain the power to destroy people who question them, and they dislike when those tactics are being turned against them. “Using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations” is “fundamentally different from the well established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” the New York Times wrote in its article.

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger added, “The political operatives behind this campaign will argue that they are ‘reporting’ on news organizations in the same way that news organizations report on elected officials and other public figures,” but he rejected that claim, insisting the antagonists digging up dirt against the employees of his company are trying to “manipulate the facts for political gain.”

To their credit, not everyone in the elite mainstream media world is buying it. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post and Jack Shafer of Politico both wrote scathing rebukes of the indignation of the New York Times. As Wemple put it, “For decades now, representatives of the mainstream media have answered conservative critiques by imploring, judge us by the work we produce, not by the fact that more than 90 percent of us are liberal or Democratic. Mainstreamers cannot have it both ways.”

Considering that the New York Times recently held a staff meeting to strategize how best to undermine President Trump, Sulzberger really does not have much standing to complain about media bias. He clearly thinks that his journalists deserve special privileges and protections since the government and political targets of their attacks are so important.

Yet, the media outlets the New York Times is painting as victims used out of context video clips to claim that a group of teenagers from a Catholic high school in Kentucky engaged in a racist attack on a Native American Vietnam veteran. The story was a false narrative that was fabricated by left wing activists and circulated by some of the most respected newspapers in the country. They did it because those teenagers wore “Make America Great Again” hats, and in the twisted minds of liberal journalists today, that makes them and their families legitimate targets of their reporting.

CNN has gone after an obscure social media user for making a meme of the president wrestling a figure with its logo. The Daily Beast, another liberal outlet, once doxxed a black forklift driver because he posted a meme about “drunk Nancy Pelosi.” Most hypocritical of all, however, is HuffPost editor in chief and New York Times alumna Lydia Polgreen. She called the prospect of journalists being held to the same standards as their targets “extremely alarming,” arguing that this “should worry anyone who cares about independent journalism,” even as people now attacked by the establishment media are also acting as independent journalists.