Donald Trump had Hillary Clinton on the ropes. She called people deplorable, got sick, and hadn't prioritized the media. Then he uttered a single sentence.
"President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period."
That, my friends, is the beginning of a new day. Not because Donnie has seen the light, but because reporters seem to have caught on to the notion that they've been aiding and abetting a fraud all along. They were outraged. They had been told he would address the birther issue and instead were treated to a lengthy string of endorsements from veterans before Trump stepped to the mic with one line that was apparently supposed to wipe away his five-year exploitation of a non-issue that launched his unscrupulous political career.
The journalists got played, punked, duped—pick your word. But before this week, traditional reporters had typically been cruising along on auto-pilot, regurgitating everything this one-man freak show says. After that classic Trumpwellian line, however, media outlets that had until now steered away from rightfully characterizing Trump as the liar he is finally turned on him.
The New York Times tried several different versions of this headline, but all of them included the word, "lie."
Trump clung to the "Birther" Lie for Years, and Still Isn't Apologetic.
Another NYT article called Trump's birther crusade a "smear:"
Mr. Trump made no apology for and took no questions about what had amounted to a five-year-long smear of the nation’s first black president.
And still another NYT piece called his tax plan a "trillion-dollar lie" because he had made polar opposite statements about the inclusion of a tax cut.
My focus on the Times is no accident. No national news outlet (excluding Fox, of course) has done more harm this cycle by obsessing over Hillary Clinton’s faults while simultaneously underplaying Donald Trump's. In fact, when Donnie's birther "revelation" (i.e., reality) first hit on Friday, it looked like the Times was poised to undersell yet another doozy.
But the turnaround that yielded the “lie” and “smear” articles later in the afternoon didn't take place in a vacuum. Earlier in the week, two reporters managed to publish actual reports revealing that Donald Trump's baggage is arguably far more problematic than Hillary Clinton's in terms of both what it does and what it doesn't do.
Kurt Eichenwald uncovered the nest of conflictual interests that Trump's businesses represent to foreign policy.
Meanwhile, David Fahrenthold revealed that, despite having an eponymous charitable foundation, Donald Trump isn't actually charitable—unless you consider repackaging other people's donations as your own to be “charitable.”
Yep, it turns out that while Donald Trump was blustering away with his media-driven megaphone, a little reporting went a long way. Nothing gets a reporter’s attention faster than being beat to a story, especially a conversation changer. Trump’s press conference trickery Friday managed to pour salt in the wound of a traveling press corps that had already had its clock cleaned this week.
In fact, the Washington Post finally began pulling back the curtain in earnest on Trump’s transparency issues, building on Fahrenthold's story with critiques like these: “It’s time for TV news to stop playing the stooge for Donald Trump” and “Clinton’s lack of transparency is bad. Trump’s is inexcusable.” Last week, the Post even went so far as to call the Clinton email story "out of control."
Now, maybe the Times is getting the memo that if they had devoted half the resources to scouring Trump's record that they have to examining Clinton's, they might have actually written something of consequence this week.
Kerry Eleveld is the author of Don't Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama's presidency.