“From the beginning, TV news far too often took his public rallies and speeches as live feeds, letting his misinformation pollute the ecosystem. And we took far too long to call his falsehoods what they often were: lies. And far too long to call his worldview what it clearly was: racist. Instead, we danced around — for years — with euphemisms like ‘misstatements’ and ‘racially tinged comments.’ Maybe worst of all, we employed the time-honored method of treating both sides of a controversy as roughly equal. This might have been fine at an earlier moment of history. But it was almost criminally misleading in the Trump era, particularly when it came to the coverage of his Republican enablers in Washington.” (A thousand times, yes.) Margaret Sullivan: The media never fully learned how to cover Trump. But they still might have saved democracy.

+ NYT: The Trump Presidency Is Ending. So Is Maggie Haberman’s Wild Ride. “For the last four years, the Times reporter has been the human incarnation of a nation riveted, like it or not, by Donald Trump.” (It hasn’t exactly been easy on me either. 4 years ago, history began checking my prostate. The exam just ended.)