Because they’re still getting conned by him, every day. He’s pretty ignorant about most things, but he knows how to play the media. He says something outrageous, and the media obediently picks it up by saying “Can you believe he said X?” “Well, what did he mean by X?” “I think that by saying X, he meant … [useless propagandistic furthering of trump’s sick message].” "We just fact-checked X and it’s not exactly the truth] …
Then he starts it all over again the next day. For 2 years he had reporters hooked on just repeating his tweets as if they were news content. He’d tweet, they’d print exactly what he said.
Not only did they print exactly what he said and propagate his message, but he’d turn around and insult them for it. Then they’d go into defense mode sputtering weak defenses of how they just repeated what he said blah blah blah. He had them playing his game, looking weak and lost and stupid.
I think many reporters are now refusing to play the game. They aren’t just parroting his tweets, they aren’t making his tweet the entire content of a story. Many are calling out the lies. Some took a long time to utter the word “lie” but more of them are just acknowledging it.