JOURNALISM:

No participant in the 2016 presidential election fares well in the Pew Research Center’s post-election voter survey: the candidates, the parties, and the electorate itself all receive historically poor marks from respondents. But the most despised institution of them all is the news media, which scored lower than ever before.

To be fair, the media stooped lower than ever before. Plus:

The press was in the crosshairs of both campaigns throughout this election, with Republicans arguing that the mainstream media was systematically biased against their candidate, and Democrats insisting that the media was “normalizing” Trump, and giving too much play to Hillary Clinton’s various email and Foundation-related controversies. While voters on both sides were unusually critical of the way the press conducted itself, the anger is especially intense among Republicans, huge majorities of whom say that the media was “too tough” on Trump and “too easy” on Hillary Clinton.

Many post-election analyses have highlighted the role of right-wing media, including “fake news” propaganda sites, in allegedly influencing the election outcome. But as we noted on Friday, this phenomenon was only made possible by the broad-based decline in trust in mainstream outlets.

If you want to be trusted, it helps to be trustworthy.

NOBODY GOES THERE ANYMORE, IT GETS TOO MANY HITS: Google will now tell you whether a bar or shop is busy in real-time.

BRITAIN TO TRUMP: ‘No vacancy’ for Farage as ambassador.

Britain on Tuesday dismissed U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s unprecedented expression of support for Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage to be made British ambassador to Washington, saying pointedly that there is no vacancy for the job.

Trump, who after his election victory met Farage before any EU leaders, said on Twitter that “many people” would like to see the former metals trader turned politician as Britain’s ambassador.

“Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job!” Trump said on Twitter.

Prime Minister Theresa May, who congratulated Trump on his victory, was swift to reject such an undiplomatic proposal.

“There is no vacancy,” a Downing Street spokesman said when asked about Trump’s remark on Tuesday. “We already have an excellent ambassador to the US.”

I’m positive Trump was simply complementing Farage in his typically bombastic way, and not actually lecturing Britain on who their U.S. ambassador should be.

But after eight years of lectures from the outgoing American President, you can hardly blame Britain for being a little touchy.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Yale President Thumbs His Nose at Federal Law.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Space Age comeback: One of Obama’s successes was bringing capitalism into outer space. Trump should follow his lead.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Texas Bill Would Reform State Asset Forfeiture Law and Close Federal Loophole.

A bill filed for the 2017 legislative session would modestly reform Texas asset forfeiture laws and close a federal loophole that allows law enforcement to avoid state restrictions on the practice.

Sen. Juan Hinojosa (D-Dist. 20) filed Senate Bill 156 (SB156) on Nov. 14. The legislation would make it more difficult for the state to win asset forfeiture cases by raising the burden of proof the state has to meet from “a preponderance of the evidence” to “clear and convincing evidence” that the asset was linked to criminal activity. The new law would still allow police to seize assets without a criminal conviction.

While the reform is somewhat modest, it would represent a step forward and set the stage for more substantive reforms in the future.

That’s a start.

PARTY OF EXTREMISM: Desperate Democrats Turn To Death Threats. “Democrats are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that they lost the presidential election. Now they are threatening to kill Republican electors unless they switch allegiance and vote for Hillary Clinton when the electoral college meets on December 19.”

OF COURSE THEY DO: CELEBRITIES AND MEDIA TYPES HAVE WIELDED UNEARNED POWER FOR YEARS. Trump’s voters love his Twitter rants against popular culture. “Here is what the cosmopolitan class still does not get: It’s not just Donald Trump you are making fun of it, is people outside your circle, it is the voters whose sentiments and values that have been the punch line of Hollywood’s jokes for their entire lives. And along comes this guy who finally says enough is enough, and they like it.”

Plus: “I know it’s probably crazy to say but I think the American people felt like it was being bullied by corporate media’s view of them. Trump is the first candidate to figuratively punch the bully in the face, and people love that.”

OH. Trump Won’t Pursue Charges Against Hillary: “She’s Been Through Enough.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, she pretty clearly deserves to be prosecuted, and any lesser-ranking official in her position would be. On the other hand, setting a precedent in which the new administration prosecutes the outgoing administration is dangerous, and gives people an incentive to cut (even more) corners to retain power. The Roman Republic had problems like this. Perhaps the best situation is to retain the possibility of prosecution, but not use it: The value of the Sword of Damocles, as they say, is that it hangs, not that it falls. But it still rankles.

PRIVACY: Coinbase Promises to Fight the IRS in Court Over Data on All Active US Bitcoin Traders.

“Although Coinbase’s general practice is to cooperate with properly targeted law enforcement inquiries, we are extremely concerned with the indiscriminate breadth of the government’s request. Our customers’ privacy rights are important to us and our legal team is in the process of examining the government’s petition. In its current form, we will oppose the government’s petition in court. We will continue to keep our customers informed on developments in this matter”, Coinbase says.

Coinbase imparted that the Internal Revenue Services sent it a summons asking for information on all users. According to the summons, an IRS agent has recently come across three cases when people used bitcoin to evade taxes. Two of three those cases concerned Coinbase customers. The IRS has also underlined that some Coinbase users are known to have not complied with federal law in the past.

These are only isolated incidents while the government may have gone too far in its intention to gain access to all of Coinbase’s users.

The I.R.S. has not proven it’s trustworthy enough to hold such sweeping powers.

WHEN WILL DEMOCRATS TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR INFLAMMATORY, VIOLENCE-PROMOTING RHETORIC? San Antonio police arrest man wanted in killing of officer targeted for ‘the uniform.’

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: One of Facebook’s enormous internet-spreading drones crashed.

NOTE HOW THIS WAPO ARTICLE ON PETER THIEL BY ELIZABETH DWOSKIN TRIES TO MAKE HIM SOUND SINISTER.

And yet it’s really a heartwarming story of a despised minority finally coming into its own: “People who have joined Thiel form a tight-knit group of conservative and libertarian-leaning entrepreneurs who have long felt ostracized in Silicon Valley for their political views, a source said. Many are excited to finally have a voice in government.”

EVEN A FLATWORM IS SMART ENOUGH TO TURN AWAY FROM PAIN: Sanders slams identity politics as Democrats figure out their future. “It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’”

ACTUALLY, I’D LIKE TO END IT: Department of Housing and Urban Development: Time for a new beginning.

JACK SHAFER: Abolish the Office of the First Lady.

Yes, defund the ridiculously large staff that currently earns upward of $1.5 million a year serving Michelle Obama; abolish the federally funded bully pulpit from which the presidential spouses have historically advocated for healthy eating, literacy, child welfare, anti-drug programs, mental health issues and beautification of highways. The president’s spouse isn’t a specimen of American royalty. By giving her a federal budget and nonstop press coverage, we endorse a pernicious kind of neo-nepotism that says, pay special attention to the person not because she’s earned it or is inherently worthy of our notice but because of who she’s related to by marriage.

The hairstyles, fashion choices, vacation destinations and pet projects of the president’s spouse are newsworthy only to the mentally vacant. Other democracies, such as the United Kingdom, bestow no such honors upon the spouses of their leaders and are better for it. To use an au courant phrase, the office of the first spouse is a swamp in need of draining. Won’t somebody please dispatch a dredger to the East Wing?

My beef isn’t against Melania Trump, the next first spouse, who seems to be a poised, harmless individual. I actually started composing this column in my head when the election of Hillary Clinton seemed inevitable. We already give mega-millionaire Bill Clinton a huge payout to run and staff his office under the federal Former Presidents Act. He’s collected in excess of $16 million since 2001. Why, I thought, give him additional funding and staff as first spouse?

Indeed.

Although to be fair, the First Lady’s budget and staff were modest prior to January, 2009.

JAMES TARANTO: A Crisis of Authority—II: The people have spoken. Obama is speaking back.

It’s true that Obama has not melted down in public the way many on the liberal left have. But Lederman overstates the case. On that foreign trip, as well as in a lengthy series of interviews, both pre- and postelection, with the New Yorker’s David Remnick, Obama has been quite fretful—torn, as at that press conference, between his duty as a lame-duck president to respect the office and the man who will soon hold it, and his anguish at what amounts to a repudiation of authority.

Here we mean not Obama’s authority as president, which he will continue to exercise until Trump is sworn in at noon on Jan. 20. Rather, what the voters repudiated was the authority of what Obama stands for. . . .

Remnick himself described the Obama presidency as “two terms long on dignity and short on scandal.” The IRS? The State Department scandal that arguably sank Mrs. Clinton’s campaign? Again, the memory hole.

In Lima on Sunday the president himself declared: “I am extremely proud of the fact that over eight years we have not had the kinds of scandals that have plagued other administrations.” That’s either delusional or very carefully worded: To our knowledge no other administration has used the IRS to punish ordinary citizens for dissent, nor faced FBI findings that the secretary of state treated classified information in an “extremely careless” fashion. . . .

Meanwhile, the Times’s new public editor, Liz Spayd, faults “the media” for “turning [Trump’s] remarks into a grim caricature that it applied to those who backed him. What struck me is how many liberal voters I spoke with felt so, too. They were Clinton backers, but, they want a news source that fairly covers people across the spectrum.”

If you’d told us in 2013, when we identified the problem of liberal-left authoritarianism, that Donald Trump would be the solution, we’d have laughed along with everyone else. But he was probably a necessary corrective. The left has waged asymmetric political warfare, routinely traducing the same norms it was demanding its opponents respect. Trump beat them at their own game, and that might have been the only way it could be done.

Choose the form of your Destructor!