A long-overdue reckoning is finally closing in on Trump

White House press pool

(REUTERS)
D. Earl Stephens
September 22, 2026 | 06:54AM ET

I’d like to think the working press has finally learned its lesson when dealing with abusive fascists, malignant narcissists, and convicted felons.

I’d like to think that after being called “the enemies of the people” and a grotesque variety of demeaning names, our mainstream media are done inviting vulgar, women-abusing creeps to their dinners where he can projectile vomit all over them while they pick away at their shrimp cocktail, and exchange gossip.

I’d like to think these things, but you’ll have to excuse me if I still don’t.

Our press has been a complete failure and a joke the past decade, and has actively contributed to our demise with their inability to carry themselves like professional journalists.

All that said … I will acknowledge even a hint of progress where I see it.

When news broke Monday morning that the major television networks joined together and suspended their pooled coverage of the dishonest Trump White House after he refused to allow CNN to serve as a pool representative, I had this three-word reaction:

IT’S ABOUT TIME.

Please excuse the heavy language, but that’s about as tame as I can keep it right now.

And before digging into this a little further, I want to reiterate a strong suggestion that I walloped our press over their heads with on Saturday after CNN, MS NOW and Politico were banned Friday from covering Trump’s repellent White House:

ALL media agencies who cover this lying, abusive sicko should refuse to go near that White House until he apologies and stops acting like Stupid Putin.
Starve this maniac, and start feeding America the facts.

Watching our press navigate the past decade in Washington, has been like watching Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau hunt down criminals in the Pink Panther comedies. The only difference, of course, is that Clouseau managed to always get his man, and the media’s stumbling, bumbling approach to journalism hasn’t been at all funny.

They have relentlessly disgraced themselves with their inability and/or refusal to spot and report real news, like Trump’s ongoing attack on our country, and have embarrassed thousands of us, who spent time in the business holding power to account, and calling liars, LIARS.

Right now, we are inches away from losing everything to a political party which spends every waking hour devising ways to extinguish our vote. This is a party that is poisoning our air and water, killing endangered species, and coddling Russia, while attacking Canada.

Up is down in America, and there are cold-blooded, masked government agents roaming our streets and killing innocent people without consequence.

Forget the fact that prices he promised to lower are rocketing ever higher, because Trump is actually filling his pockets with our money.

We are under attack in America, and most of our media goes about its business like we are dealing with nothing but another rainy day.

Even the Associated Press was kicking the lying, duplicitous Trump with both feet Monday when they posted this blast of truth out on Bluesky.

Perfectly put, and more, please. Reporting the truth shouldn’t be this hard.

And this note: I am a fan of AP, for what it’s worth. They were one of the first who Trump went after for reporting the truth when they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico anything other than the Gulf of Mexico in their reporting.

I still see some instances where they can do better, but it’s only because I am an angry, old newspaperman, who has been beaten on by better journalists than myself over the course of a long career for getting even the littlest things wrong.

It is impossible to process just how shoddy and bad things have become with our media the past decade.

Now it looks like being kicked down the White House stairs by a limping 80-year-old deviant was the last straw for a handful of these major media conglomerates. Now we wait to see if this is the beginning of something bolder, a return to truth, and holding power to account, or if they faint from the thin air of standing up for editorial principle, a free press and their viewers.

How will they comport themselves if and when Trump allows them back in OUR White House?

I guess we can hope for the best, but you’ll have to excuse me if I am highly skeptical they’ve learned a damn thing.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and awarding-winning journalist who ran newsrooms, and worked in the newspaper business for decades. You can find all his work here.