According to Politico, bias in journalism is as American as apple pie and nonpartisanship has no place in the mainstream media.

In his piece, “Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism. And Good Riddance,” Mitchell Stephens argues that there’s at least one positive outcome of a Donald Trump presidency: it’s “already remaking American journalism.” He’s not talking about the talking heads on radio, on Twitter, or around the web. Stephens is specifically talking about the legacy media at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and -- most laughable given the current circumstances -- CNN.

Stephens states that “the big news in American journalism today” is not the rise in investigative reporting, but the boldness of on-air and in-print personalities who are “so eager to dispute the more questionable pronouncements of the Trump administration” they are now using terms like “lies” and “falsehoods.”

“The big news is that many of our best journalists seem, in news coverage, not just opinion pieces, to be moving away from balance and nonpartisanship,” Stephens praises.

For Stephens, an aggressively partisan news team is not the death of American journalism, but “a return to American journalism’s roots,” something he says is “long overdue:”

Journalism in the United States was born partisan and remained, for much of its history, loud, boisterous and combative. Note this appraisal of one of our presidents in the leading opposition newspaper of his time: “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by …. .” The commander in chief—and alleged debaucher—whose name completed this sentence? George Washington.

This attack upon our now sainted first president was launched by a zealous anti-Federalist editor. Well into the 20th century, newspaper editors tended to be zealous something-or-others, and large numbers of the columns in their newspapers reflected their points of view…

This all changed in the 20th century.

Stephens argues that the once described “on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that” type of journalism was popularized in the latter part of the 20th century but has since become what most consider “traditional” journalism.

“But let’s not romanticize this era of mostly disinterested journalism,” Stephens writes. “Given the fear of being caught possessing an opinion, pussyfooting abounded. And with so many journalism organizations clustered near ‘the middle,’ the range of available viewpoints necessarily narrowed.”

Now with the Internet, which has brought Twitter, BuzzFeed, the Drudee Report, Breitbart, and a host of partisan voices left and right, Stephens says its time the big networks find their place: “Our legacy journalism organizations—including NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, NPR, PBS, the Associated Press and most daily newspapers—were slow to recognize the new order and find their voices in the din. They continued to police themselves for tilts and biases and remained a little vanilla well into the 21st century. Indeed, their obsession with nonpartisanship lingered long enough to leave them deeply vulnerable to manipulation by a boisterous, rudderless presidential candidate like Trump.”

Stephens pointed to CBS Evening News’s recently ousted anchor, Scott Pelley, as one reporter above all others who seems most willing to face Trump head on in the vein of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who took down Richard Nixon. He pointed to the specific moment just 17 days after the inauguration that Pelley said Trump is “divorced from reality.” Stephens said others are starting to catch on:

Our most respected mainstream journalism organizations are beginning to recognize the failings of nonpartisanship—its tepidness, its blind spots, its omissions, its evasions…

Journalists at many, perhaps most, mainstream journalism organizations now seem comfortable detailing the incompetence or dishonesty of the Trump administration without always feeling the need to quote someone contributing to the dishonesty by denying what is clearly true…

American journalism has been changing in front of our eyes. And even after historians have taken over from reporters the task of investigating the depredations of the Trump administration—the old “on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that” style of journalism is not coming back. The condition that created it—a limited supply of news organs, which sought large audiences by not offending—is gone. Its weaknesses are manifest. Journalists will not willingly slip that straightjacket back on. Our now unlimited supply of news organs is instead encouraging a robust, contentious style of journalism that George Washington might in some ways have recognized.

Better that journalists surrender the old pretense to objectivity entirely. Our best reporters must still dig and keep digging, check and double-check as they investigate. They must still be fair to those they cover and give credit or blame where due. But can’t we now acknowledge that the New York Times and the Washington Post—in their take on the news as well as in their editorials—are deeply skeptical about Trump’s presidency? Is it not time for CNN and the others who are in that camp to own up to it, too? Certainly, there is a roster of journalism organizations, albeit not as extensive and distinguished, on the other side. Why can’t all newspapers and news channels stop pussyfooting and own up to having something of a political point of view?

And so it goes with liberal journalism, where they prefer to keep the blinders on. Exactly what Stephens describes in his piece is the very reason they now have an opponent in the White House. This is what happens when you don’t have a finger on the pulse of America and it's increasingly clear that the only pulse they’re interested in is their own.