The way political journalism worked before Donald Trump seems quaint in retrospect. If it was a presidential election year, a reporter was assigned a candidate to cover. The first thing task was to contact the campaign and notify them of the assignment. If the campaign was serious, press credentials were issued to allow access to the campaign headquarters and into his — it was always a “he” — rallies. In the old days, if the paper or network you worked for was important enough, your pass would get you onto the “press plane” and the bus populated by the “Boys on the Bus,” in the words of the title of Timothy Crouse’s best-selling book on the way the press covered the 1972 presidential campaign. The “boys” were the other political journalists following the campaign, because with perhaps one or two exceptions, there were no female political reporters.

You didn’t have to cover American politics very long to realize that politicians lied, prevaricated and said things that were demonstrably untrue all the time. It didn’t take much longer to learn that you weren’t there to report their lies. You were there to report what politicians said. You were, in effect, a stenographer. Lies, if they were remarked upon at all, were the domain of pundits.

As a political reporter, you could point to gaffes, however. Remember gaffes? A good part of the job of a political journalist was to endure hours and days and weeks and months of tedium on the campaign trail waiting for that ever-hoped-for moment when the candidate would make a gaffe and you were there to witness it and write about it. A candidate would sometimes say what we now call “the quiet part out loud,” expressing his real view that cutting taxes actually did affect the deficit, rather than give his talking point that tax cuts would raise revenues instead of adding to the deficit. A candidate might misspeak, or, as Edmund Muskie was said to have done in New Hampshire while running in the 1972 Democratic primary, break down in tears right there in front of the press, and everyone would run to the phones to call in this groundbreaking political moment that was certain to bury his candidacy, which it did.

If you were lucky after days and weeks and months on the road, you might be there when a candidate makes a mistake, saying he was in Des Moines when he was actually in Detroit. If a candidate told a lie out loud, it wouldn’t be called that, of course, because the press didn’t accuse politicians of lying back then. It would be called a “distortion” or even a........

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