Media commit malpractice if they avoid a moral stand

make up its own mind. Otherwise, he said, “you run the risk that you look like you are ... not being objective.”

Besides, he added, Hillary Clinton also spoke some untruths, but media were not so quick to label her a liar.

Of course, the plain fact is that Trump is a liar — and a fantastically prodigious one at that. Baker’s preferred method of handling this would be like reporting on each individual drop of water that falls, but never mentioning the storm.

And likening Trump’s untruths to Clinton’s is like likening Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring to Zan Tabak’s. Abdul-Jabbar is the all-time leading scorer in NBA history. You’ve probably never heard of Tabak, though he also played in the NBA and, once in a while, scored a basket.

Baker’s is a mindset that has become all too common. With the obvious exception of certain partisan news outlets, some reporters, fearful of being tagged for “bias” on contentious issues, seek to safeguard themselves by ritually quoting a source from Side A and another from Side B while avoiding even painfully obvious conclusions. They call this “fair and balanced.” It’s actually gutless and dumb..

The plain fact is, journalism without judgment — moral judgment — cannot exist. If you doubt it, try a thought experiment. You’re a news manager on a day when the mayor is cutting the ribbon on a new hospital and there’s been a mass shooting at the mall. What’s your top story? Is it the shooting? Why? Won’t the hospital directly impact more people? If you go with the shooting, what angle will you take? What resources will you commit? What answers will you demand?

Yes, news media must strive to be fair, to hold all sides to rigorous account, to offer a balanced view. But occasionally, there comes a point — subjective, but no less real for that — when pretending to moral equivalence between those sides is a lie, an act of journalistic malpractice.

In these perilous times, with authoritarianism coming to the White House and bizarre untruths infesting our national discourse, that is a sin we can ill afford.

There are two sides to every story, goes the axiom. But you know what?

Sometimes there’s only the one.

When Barack Obama moves 2 miles from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to 2446 Belmont Road in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, he will live half a mile from 2340 S. St., where Woodrow Wilson spent his three post-presidential years. Wilson’s embittering foreign policy failure was the Senate’s rejection of the U.S. participation in the embodiment of Wilsonian aspirations, the League of Nations. Obama leaves office serene because “almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago.”

Two seemingly unimpressed nations are Russia, which is dismembering a European nation (Ukraine)