In 2016, I felt that much of mainstream journalism had lost its soul to Donald Trump.

Journalism, conceived by the Founding Fathers as an institutional check on the abuse, had ceded it’s moral authority and influence to Trump. He had them on the run since 2016.

Even journalism’s most powerful and respected leaders – the New York Times, The Washington Post, the CBS, NBC and ABC News, the once-proud Sunday news Shows, the nervous and uncertain cable channels – failed their viewers and readers.

They quickly grasped that Trump lied obsessively, almost addictively, and they repeated and amplified, and normalized his lies.

They permitted him to smear his political opponents – Hillary and her nothing-burger e-mails, Benghazi, and her mythical responsibility for it.

He repeatedly promised to lock up his political opponents and turned Fox News into the American Equivalent of Russian State News TV.

The cable channels gave Trump hours and hours of unchecked air time and profited greatly from his ravings. The press gave him a daily gift by letting him dominate them in front of his helicopters on the White House Law and create his own all-encompassing narrative every day.

When he didn’t like a question, he would just wave goodbye and wake away. They call that being complicit.

By jumping up and down like dogs in heat when FBI Director James Comey inappropriately and recklessly claimed Clinton in the middle of a close election had messed up further with those Weiner e-mails to his wife on her computer, Comey and the media helped bring about her defeat.

Trump had won his Master’s Degree in character assassination. It worked so well he tried it again last week. He hadn’t changed, but journalism has.

The corporate cable media has made billions of dollars off of loving and hating Trump. He is always good TV, but journalism was supposed to be a bit more discriminating than that, especially when everyone knew the President had a big truth problem.

It was only a few months ago that I saw a real and sudden change. \Rather than shout questions on the White House lawn, TV reporters on Axios, NBC, even Fox News (once in a while) began challenging him on his most blatant lies, sparking his rage, cruelty and denial.

The more he was challenged, the worse he looked.

Suddenly the best of the “fake news” started fulfilling their constitutional role and challenging this powerful and manipulate man when he lied or stretched the truth or tried to smear his political enemies.

They challenged his lies on the coronavirus, reporting on the rising caseloads and growing death toll. They reported that he was lying about how soon a vaccine would be available. They found out that he lied about the danger.

They exposed his attempted to politicize the CDC and FDA with relentless pressure to hurry along with remedies and vaccines.

They exposed his lies about fake cures for the virus, and the shallow credentials and dubious judgments of the advisers he liked, rather than the advisers most of the country trusted – like Anthony Fauci.

His followers howled that they were persecuting him, and he morphed into President Whineass.

Journalists have rushed to the defense of Fauci, pointing out the falsehoods about him launched by Trump and his allies. The “fake news” didn’t buy it. Because of journalism, Fauci is much more trusted than the President.

That is mostly because Fauci doesn’t really know how to lie.

I loved journalism and especially relished my role as a check on authority. I loved reporting on the police, on government corruption, and on politics. To my knowledge, I never knowingly printed one word I knew was false. I would have been fired in a second for doing that.

It was never my job to pass along the lies of politicians, but to challenge and expose them when they occurred.

That was the ethos of the time, not the conspiratorial liberalism we started to be accused of in the ’80s and 90’s. Most of my colleagues were hard-drinking Republicans from Ireland.

I saw in 2016 that they had defanged us, neutered us, flummoxed us. Journalists had no idea what to do with someone like Donald Trump. I was happy to move on to book writing.

As his corruption and dishonestly became more and more apparent, antediluvian notions of fairness and objectivity crippled journalists further. The media universe has changed radically in recent years. The mainstream media, not so much.

Trump sent mainstream journalism into shock, and they are just recently beginning to recover, thanks mostly to brave and professional women reporters.

Old media notions of balance didn’t cripple Fox News or Breitbart or a dozen far-right websites, they were all quite happy to lie and pass along lies – that became their mission, in fact, their purpose. They called themselves fair and balanced but made a point of being neither.

And their mission was much stronger and clearer than the mission of the stunned and paralyzed mainstream media. But the problem is, when you tolerate lies and pass them along, you lose credibility yourself.

I like Trump’s Veteran’s Choice lie as a good example of how this dynamic is changing.

For a couple of years now, Trump has been claiming falsely that he is the one who  got the Veteran’s Choice program passed (allowing veterans to choose their doctors) adding in a New Jersey Press Conference “They’ve been trying to get that passed for decades and decades and no president’s ever been able to do it, and we got it done.”

In fact, President Obama signed the program into law in 2014.

“Why do you keep saying that you passed Veterans Choice?” CBS News White House correspondent Paula Reid asked Trump at the Saturday news conference at Trump’s New Jersey golf course, during which Trump announced executive actions on coronavirus relief.

As Trump tried to call on another reporter instead, Reid continued,  she wasn’t having it: “You said that you passed Veterans Choice. It was passed on 2014…it was a false statement, sir.”

Trump paused, then froze, then responded: “OK. Thank you very much, everybody. He then walked away as the song “YMCA” played in the background.

Two weeks ago, Trump ran away from a CBS News 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl because she challenged his blatant lie that he had presided over the greatest economy in American history (he hasn’t.)

Trump had also tried to get Stahl to bite on his “October Surprise (remember Hillary’s e-mails) by claiming the FBI had taken possession of a mysterious laptop that once belonged to Hunter Biden and that had e-mailed to the “Big Man,’ who was supposed to be Joe Biden trying to make money in Ukraine.

When he was being filmed, he had an aide give Stahl a huge box containing his new health care proposal, he bragged.

When she opened it later, it was filled with former executive orders and faxes. He kept it in the 60 minutes tape he put on his Twitter account to teach Stahl a lesson for daring to question him.

Trump’s almost comically slime-bag lawyer Rudy Guiliani, recently filmed groping himself on film in the bedroom of a fake female reporter (Sacha Baron Cohen’s daughter, pausing as a reporter.) Guilian then met with reporters from the  Wall Street Journal, hoping they would bite on this apparently Guiliane-concocted tale.

Trump was tweeting about this laptop for days. The Journal, a conservative but notoriously honest newspaper, said there was no evidence such a laptop ever existed and Guiliani wouldn’t or couldn’t produce it. They declined to publish it.

So the story was leaked to the New York Post, which ran it along with Fox News, which treated it like Watergate.

Trump’s vaunted campaign machine seems to have become the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

There was the Tiktok humiliation of Trump in Tulsa, the ride around Walter Reed Hospital, the Bible Disaster in Lafayette Square, his Hannibal Lecter impersonation at the debate, his wild ride on steroids,  and his new campaign to spread the coronavirus all over the United States so he can prove it isn’t really a big deal.

There are also those amazing boat rallies up and down the East Coast.

I wonder how many voters changed their minds after watching five of them sink in a Texas Lake. Trump is so lucky he’s debating with a mushy nice guy, a true debater would have left chunks of him on the floor.

I can’t wait to see the movie.

Journalism should never be forgiven for letting things get this far. They are making up for it.

Trump even referred to Hunter Biden’s laptop clumsily in the last presidential debate, but no one – including me – had any idea what he was talking about. The mainstream media, of which the Wall Street Journal is an essential part, helped retain journalistic honor.

That is a huge change and it ought to be noted.

In the Trump bubble, there were all sorts of shouts of bias, and cowardice and Guilian’a lame-brain plot collapsed.

But the most interesting thing about all of this is that it showed me that the mainstream media, the “fake news” that Trump and his Fox News groupies so regularly deride, was the place they most wanted the story to run.

Why didn’t they ask Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson to run the phone story, either one of them would have been thrilled to do it?

The answer is obvious now: because no one who really counted would believe them.

That is what Trump has done to his notion of journalism, and tried and failed to do with the real one. When all is said and done, the reporters held their ground and did the right thing. More and more people are believing them.

That is a major reason Joe Biden is still ahead.

The “fake news” is becoming credible again. What they have been screaming about – the pandemic, lying, unreality – is all coming true.

What viewer under the age of 65 and isn’t an angry or white man believes a word that Fox News says about anything?

If the Wall Street Journal or CBS News had gone for it, it could have sunk the Biden campaign. But they all saw it as a conspiracy theory orchestrated by Guiliani who now has even less credibility than Trump.

Earlier this year, Trump told NBC reporter Peter Alexander during the coronavirus briefing on Friday that he should be ashamed of himself when Alexander asked whether he was giving Americans a false sense of hope with his optimism about a malaria drug’s potential use in response to the virus.

Alexander wasn’t ashamed, he was praised all over the place.

Axios reporter Jonathan Swan stunned the journalism world in early summer by employing a powerful tactic that had rarely been used by any White House journalists, certainly not the sycophants from Fox News and the cowed members of the White House Press Corps.

He asked basic follow-up questions rather than simply allowing Trump to lie and slide away.

(To a lesser degree, Chris Wallace, Fox News token professional anchor did the same thing in an interview on July 19. But Swan reminded journalists of what journalists are supposed to do: not just ask questions, but challenge falsehoods.)

Trump: You know there are those that say you can test too much, you do know that?

Swan: “Who says that?”

Trump:  “Oh, just read the manuals. Read the books.”

Swan: “Manuals? What Manuals?”

Trump: “Read the books. Read the books.”

Swan: “What books?”

Of course, Trump hadn’t read any manuals and is believed to have never read a book in his life.

Trump moved on, but couldn’t answer.

The exchange was historic, it was the beginning of Trump’s downfall. The first thing young journalists learn is to do their homework, and follow-up. Trump drowned out most of the things journalists learned.

The Axios interview shocked the journalism world: it marked the first time a well-known interviewer from a “fake news” organization had ever followed up about Trump’s blatant bullshit in so direct a way.

Swan didn’t let up until Trump blinked. Again and again. Shockingly, this had not happened before.

It was about four years too late, but still, journalism began to get its soul back and do what journalists had always done and done well.

Suddenly, journalism seemed to wake up.  Trump still lies, but he wasn’t getting away with it beyond his own followers anymore. No more blank checks.

Trump has been trashing NBC reporter Savannah Guthrie all over the country for the humiliating fact-checking she did during his town meeting appearance on NBC, accusing her at rallies all over the country of partisanship, hatred and having vicious eyes.

If he means to intimidate her, he has failed. She looked great and did well. The rewards will be great.

Trump has serious issues with strong women, and there are some very strong women in journalism now. Most of them had to fight very hard to get where they are, and they don’t take guff from anybody, certainly not a hollow shell-like President Trump.

They are beating the crap out of him.

Obama nailed him in a speech in Florida last week. He called Trump out as being a coward from running from Lesley Stahl and whining about her tough questions. It’s true.

He is terrified of strong women, they unhinge him. Journalists and Democrats may have found the secret weapon. He keeps calling Kamala Harris a monster and a communist.

She keeps laughing at him.

Before the last few months, journalists put up with Trump’s insults and often vicious attacks, (don’t forget his jeering at a handicapped New York Times reporter) clinging to bankrupt notions of objectivity, which says reporters should have no feelings or views of their own.

That might have worked a century ago, but it no longer works in 2020 America, as black journalists have been trying to point out for years now.

Journalists’ first obligation is to the truth, they aren’t paid to be deferential or polite, not in 2020.

Trump is complaining at his rallies that Biden is treated more gently than he is, and that is true, but the big reason is that Biden, whatever his faults, doesn’t lie nearly as much as Trump.

Fearless women journalists have spearheaded journalism’s return to dignity and influence – Savannah Guthrie, Stahl, Reid, Megyn Kelly, NPR’s Yamiche Alcindor, Weijia Jiang of CBS.

Brazen lying is and should be the red flag that gets reporters standing up in their seats and challenging and exposing the liars.

Suddenly, journalists are no longer simply recording the election, they have once again become powerful, increasingly trusted, and an essential part of the process. They are a check to unbridled power, as the Founders meant them to be. They are, at their best, the last resort for truth.

Trump tries to portray all of his critics as Democrats and liars, but he has mostly succeeded in helping journalism get some of its mojo and respect back.

This is wonderful news for me, and I think, for the good of the country.

Trump showed up at a time when journalism was reeling from online competition, weaponized right-wing websites, and a master media manipulator. He has sparked massive and lucrative subscriptions for media like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Atlantic.

New subscriptions to all three are skyrocketing, so is their influence.

All three have also become some of his most credible and damaging critics. He did that, they could not have done it alone.

Thanks to him, reporters are getting their mojo back and he is the one reeling,  fleeing one press conference after another. That is perhaps among the most revealing things he has done in his tumultuous campaign for re-election.

Welcome back. And just in the nick of time.