Drip. Drip. Drip.

It was a week that began with pundits declaring a "new Trump" had emerged after a speech to a joint session of Congress. It ended with reporters digging up memories of a "new Nixon" and the travails of his attorneys general.

The punditocracy that go on television to offer instant opinions on events were stumbling over themselves Tuesday night to declare President Trump had indeed performed the long-awaited "pivot" and had finally acted presidential in a 60-minute address that included a lengthy, tear-stained standing ovation for the widow of a Navy SEAL who died on what now seems like an ill-fated raid into Yemen.

The TelePrompter-reading President was a indeed a far cry from his Twitter alter-ego, they declaimed.

Then came the rest of the week.

The Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan was among the better critics of the over-the-top effort by pundit panels to try and declare a cease fire in the media's "war" with the White House.

"But as if to say that not all media are created equal, along came two blockbuster stories from two longtime rival newspapers."

She then duly noted the twin hits by the Post and The New York Times to break new ground iohe issue Trump's frenetic media campaign is designed to obscure: Russia.

While the Times reported efforts by the Obama administration to preserve evidence obtained to date in the probes into Russian interference with the 2016 election, the Post scored a major hit: catching Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions in an, um, contradiction about his meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

By the time Friday rolled around, Sessions had recused himself from the Justice Department's ongoing investigation over Russian influence after a (William Jefferson) Clintonian parsing of the definition of a meeting.

Oh, and not to leave out the 2016 Democratic nominee who was pilloried over her email server, the Indianapolis Star was out with a story that former governor and now Vice President Mike Pence conducted state business over AOL -- and was hacked.

The moral of the story? Journalism and opinion-peddling are two different things. They can exist in the same universe and when opinion is properly acknowledged as such, it has value.

But that opinion needs to be based on fact, reported in effect. Instant analysis suffers from a huge flaw: not just being instant but also based on gut and partisan leanings. In the case of the post-speech punditry, it seemed there was a strong desire to say something nice about a president who has been under regular media shelling.

With the light of another day, many opinioners suggested that we saw a "kinder, gentler" Trump only in that he offered the same policy pronouncements within a prettier wrapper. Not to mention that he appeared to engage in what one anonymous "senior administration official" (i.e., anonymous source) aknowledged as "misdirection."

It's worth noting that when Trump took to Twitter to declare his full support for Sessions, he leveled his blast at Democrats and not the media, declaring the rising storm as a "witch hunt" rather than "FAKE NEWS."

That may be a result of the fact an attorney general did not tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to a congressional hearing on his nomination, bringing to mind the sagas of Richard Kleindeinst and John Mitchell, the latter who had ample prison time to think about his attacks on Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham.

A newswoman who placed a higher value on shoe leather reporting than on punditry.