I don't think any of those things should be legal, and I'm not sure why you're assuming that I would.
I'm not assuming that you would think that, I'm drawing a parallel between anonymous political speech (advocating on a message board) and anonymous political speech (giving money to a SuperPAC. Which is speech now. This is not illegal, by the way - one of the consequences of Citizens United.), and another parallel between threatening violence on someone you don't like (a bomb threat - illegal) and publicly celebrating violence on someone you don't like (creating an effigy getting beaten up - not illegal, but the idea was that you would be able to see how these two things are kind of similar anyway. It's an analogy, after all.).
Also: "He doesn't have to explain himself for anything, unless he's actually charged with inciting violence (which he won't, because it wasn't)." I didn't say that he needed to do anything. I said that they needed to give him the opportunity to explain himself if he chose to do so.
Anyway, we're partially in agreement at the outset of this: there's a trend in journalism to add information to a story which may not be strictly necessary. Something I notice often is when they add a person's age and occupation, when those things have nothing to do with the event that they're reporting on. e.g.: "I'm here at the scene of a remarkable meteor strike, with an eye witness. Jon Johnson, 68, is a retired choreoanimator who was just walking down the street picking his nose when he says he heard a loud noise. Jon, how did that noise make you feel?"
They don't do this because the person's age or occupation are important, but because it adds a little bit of background. The audience can connect to a story a little bit better when it's fleshed out, when they're given a little more information, so that the characters and events aren't presented in a vacuum.
This annoys me because I don't generally read the news. I skim the news. I'm not looking for a story when I'm going over a news article, I'm looking for the facts and nothing else. However, I do understand why journalists do this. I don't resent them for it, and I don't think they're doing a bad job by adding extra information.
That is part of what I think happened in this case. I'm imagining something like this:
"Trump posted a meme attacking us, we should say something about it."
"Okay, we'll point out that Trump is being Trump again."
"... And?"
"And... That's bad."
"Maybe we could dig a little deeper."
"We could do a story about the role of the press, and how his constant attacks on anyone who questions him are sabotaging one of the basic requirements of democracy - namely, that the voting public be informed."
"Again? How many of those can we do in a week? We're doing a story on one particular tweet: what can we say about that?"
"Well... we don't know where Trump got this meme, but it's been making the rounds on social media. Maybe we could try and figure out where it came from."
"Okay then. We're supposed to be doing full diligence on Trump's tweeting anyway."