Thank you so much for this thoughtful comment! You expressed what I was trying to say better than I did. ;-)

The mainstream news media, broadly speaking, really has dropped the ball... They are so obsessed with proving that they are "fair" and "not liberal biased" that many of them have forgotten their primary responsibility... which is to call BS on BS.

The moderators did that a couple of times, but gently and briefly! Like an English teacher noting a grammar error. A candidate stating the other side approves of and promotes infanticide needs to not just be robotically corrected but smacked down hard.

And in focus groups, they just let people say whatever and just smile a goofy smile and nod at them. Thereby validating some of the stupid garbage coming out of people's mouths by not challenging them or correcting them.

All out of a mistaken and warped understanding of what "impartial" actually means. They have abdicated their responsibilities, and thus are as much to blame as Trump himself for the weakening of democracy in America.

There are a lot of people not doing their homework, and number one on the list in my eyes is mainstream media. With very few exceptions.