One of the hot topics of the 2016 election season, particularly over the past several weeks, has been the media’s impact on the presidential race. Donald Trump has made media-bashing a cornerstone of his presidential campaign, even taking the unprecedented step of banning certain news organizations from his events as a penalty for their negative coverage of the Republican nominee. He and many of his supporters have accused major media outlets of being in bed with the Clinton campaign and focusing more on Trump’s many missteps than on those of the Democratic nominee. Trump is far from the first Republican to level such charges; for years, Republican candidates up and down the ballot have accused the mainstream media of harboring ill-concealed biases against the GOP and its candidates.

Trump’s allies point to what they consider slanted media coverage of many of the controversies that have plagued the Republican’s campaign over the last year. Just in the past few weeks, Trump has been mocked and pilloried by the media for flip-flopping on immigration policy, insisting that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the co-founders of ISIS, commenting that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary even after she appoints liberal judges, encouraging the Russians to hack the private server Hillary used during her years as Secretary of State, and squabbling with the parents of a Muslim soldier who heroically sacrificed himself to save his fellow Americans. Trump supporters both within the campaign and outside of it have maintained that these controversies were manufactured by the mainstream media in an effort to promote Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Trump himself has taken up this stance, recently telling a crowd in Connecticut, “I’m running against the crooked media.”

The fact that the media is biased against Mr. Trump is not really up for debate. Multiple liberal members of the press have in fact admitted that they believe it is their duty to cover the reality-TV star candidate in a negative light. Glenn Greenwald, an uber-liberal investigative journalist, conceded to Slate that “the U.S. media is essentially 100% united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president.” Neil Gabler wrote on Bill Moyers’ journalism website that the widespread media criticism of Trump “means the press is doing its job. Call it partisan bias if you like. I call it journalism.” Now, I am no fan of Donald Trump, but it doesn’t take a Trump supporter to realize that this approach from the mainstream news media is utterly outrageous. It is not the place of television networks and newspapers to intentionally taint their coverage in a concerted effort to throw a presidential election to a certain candidate. Such bias does not mean the press is “doing its job.” It means that liberal media executives are trying to brainwash Americans by magnifying Trump’s faults and concealing Hillary’s. That’s about as unethical as the media can get.

There are those in the media world who maintain that anti-Trump news stories are not in fact unethical. This school of thought holds that criticizing Trump is included in the media’s job to report the news objectively, because some of the things he says are objectively inaccurate or downright crazy. Trump has made false and divisive statements about minorities and immigrants. He has mocked the disabled. He peddles in conspiracy theories on a regular basis. He has kept the fact-checkers busier than any candidate in memory- and the verdict is usually that he lied or stretched the truth. Hence, members of the media maintain, their negative coverage of Trump is not without merit.

This explanation of anti-Trump bias in the press, however, doesn’t hold water when one considers the media’s kid-glove treatment of Hillary Clinton and other liberal Democrats. Whenever mainstream media reporters are busy expressing shock and disgust over the latest utterance from Donald Trump’s unfiltered mouth, they are usually ignoring or airbrushing the latest Hillary Clinton scandal. While Donald Trump is far from a saint, Hillary is hardly more pious than her opponent. You wouldn’t pick up on that if you relied on mainstream media outlets for your information, though, because they report on Trump’s misdeeds with far more vigor and indignation than they can muster when Hillary is on the wrong side of the news cycle. Hillary Clinton is as corrupt as politicians come, and that simple reality has manifested itself in all sorts of ways throughout the past year-plus.

She violated State Department rules by using a private, unsecured email server while she was secretary of state. When this transgression was revealed, Hillary immediately deleted thousands of emails so they would not be turned over to the State Department. She then claimed that the State Department already had her emails, which the State Department denied. She also claimed that nothing she sent on her private server was classified, a boldfaced lie which was later refuted by both the State Department and the FBI. FBI director James Comey delivered a stinging rebuke of Mrs. Clinton’s email practices at the State Department, accusing the former secretary of state of “extreme carelessness.” More recently, conservative criticism of Hillary has centered around pay-to-play allegations with regard to Bill and Hillary’s work at the Clinton Foundation, the nonprofit organization established by the family after President Clinton left office.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to say that the mainstream media has ignored Hillary Clinton’s scandals. There has in fact been reporting on all of these controversies. However, to say that the media’s negative coverage of the former first lady has been more tempered than its criticism of her opponent would be a gross understatement. Both in quantity and in quality, the press’s coverage of Donald Trump has been far more negative than its coverage of Hillary Clinton. The conspiracy theorists at Breitbart who dream up theories about Hillary’s health are relegated to the fringe of politics, where they belong. But mainstream television networks are able to bring on liberal psychoanalysts- who have never even met Trump- to try and diagnose the businessman with all sorts of emotional and mental disabilities. This is hypocrisy at its best. If liberal media personalities really think reporting on Donald Trump’s controversies the way they do is ethical, they should report on Hillary’s many scandals with same levels of attention and disgust.

In the case of Donald Trump, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the media. He says crazy and oftentimes untrue things. Many of his policy prescriptions are completely absurd and have been roundly rejected by experts on both sides of the aisle. I can relate to the media’s urge to cover Trump in an expressly negative light. However, that’s not their job. If liberal news anchors want to quit their jobs and become commentators or editorialists, they can feel free to tell us all their opinions. As long as they remain reporters, though, they have a responsibility to report the news in an unbiased and evenhanded manner. And that includes holding Hillary Clinton to the same standard they hold Donald Trump to.

It amuses me that the mainstream media is now embracing Mitt Romney and other Republicans who have the guts to stand up to Trump’s hateful rhetoric. Just four short years ago, the same media was bashing Romney, then the Republican nominee for president, and giving him very unfavorable treatment as compared to President Obama. When a tape surfaced in which Romney made poorly-worded, insensitive remarks about poor people, the media pounced. They took his words out of context and completely eviscerated him, helping to hand the election to Barack Obama. Romney’s comments should not have been treated as any more controversial or inflammatory than when Obama told employers in June 2012, “You didn’t build that,” referring to their businesses. Romney’s comment received more than ten times the TV coverage the Obama comment got, though. All of it was negative.

So the media bias phenomenon is not new or unprecedented. Donald Trump is not unique in his victimhood. Republican candidates, Trump included, have to learn to live in a world of liberal media and overcome it instead of whining about it. While attacking the media is certainly an effective primary election strategy, it’s not what voters want to hear about in the general election. Americans want solutions instead of problems. They want to be empowered instead of weakened. They want to be unified instead of divided. There is no doubt that the liberal media is biased against Trump. But the media did not manufacture his many controversies- it merely amplified them. If Trump loses to Hillary in November, which seems increasingly certain to be the outcome, it won’t be because of the media. It will be because he failed to give the American people the kind of hope and inspiration they crave. It will be no one’s fault but his own.