According to a new Gallup poll, just 32 percent of Americans said they had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media – the lowest number ever recorded. Not coincidentally, on Friday morning, network news chiefs, angered after being trolled into silence by Donald Trump on the issue of President Obama’s birth in Hawaii, reportedly decided to “pull a camera and erase video of Donald Trump giving a tour of his hotel,” according to Hadas Gold of Politico.

The media members blamed the anti-Trump boycott on failure to allow editorial presence on the tour; a member of the traveling press said, “The pool rules state any event that is pooled with cameras, there has to be a pool producer. Due to the fact we were not granted editorial access, as is customary, that decision was made and the footage was erased.” The press claims that the designated pool producer was “physically restrained” from coming along on the tour.

In reality, the decision to pull the coverage of the tour altogether likely sprang from frustration over Trump’s earlier trollery; the media wanted to be able to ask Trump questions about his history of birtherism, and he didn’t allow them that opportunity. In retaliation, they decided to stop covering the opening of Trump’s DC hotel.

Now, the Hillary campaign has repeatedly confined reporters. Last year, the Clinton campaign banned a representative from the national print pool from events in New Hampshire; major controversy erupted when Hillary roped off members of the media during the July 4th weekend; Hillary didn’t give a press conference for nearly a year. As far as I’m aware, at no point did the press delete actual footage of Hillary Clinton and cancel any tour with her. And they continue to treat her with great enthusiasm and deference.

They reserved their scorn and boycotts for Trump.

And that only happened when Trump angered them.

No wonder the American public doesn’t trust the press. This isn’t dispassionate, objective behavior. It’s spiteful and stupid. Either there’s a basic standard beyond which the press will go, in which case it ought to apply to Hillary Clinton and the most restrict anti-press president in modern history, Barack Obama, or there isn’t. The double standard itself proves Trump’s case: the media ought not be trusted, and they deserve to be manipulated.