The gloves are off. Key media organizations are increasingly willing to call Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump a liar and a deceiver. And four of the most influential news outlets--the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Politico--all carried hard-hitting stories last weekend describing Trump as a peddler of falsehoods.

The upshot is that the era of relatively even-handed journalism appears to be waning, at least in Trump's case. Now, news organizations seem eager to call out Trump, who they say is more willing to lie and distort than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

NEWS OF THE DAY: What to Watch for in the Debate Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ]

"Trump's campaign would appear to be an opening for news organizations to add value for their audiences by coming to firmer conclusions on politicians' statements, " writes David Uberti in the Columbia Journalism Review. "Or, to borrow a phrase often bastardized by outsider politicians, telling it like it is."

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the new truth-squad style of political coverage came in the New York Times on Sunday. Under the headline "A Week of Whoppers From Trump," a full-page article by Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns included a long list of what were described as Trump departures from the truth. "All politicians bend the truth to fit their purposes, including Hillary Clinton," the Times said. "But Donald J. Trump has unleashed a blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies in the general election, peppering his speeches, interviews and Twitter posts with untruths so frequent that they can seem flighty or random--even compulsive."

The article goes on to list 12 "tall tales about himself," including Trump's insistence that he "was against going into the war in Iraq," a claim which the Times said "is not getting any truer with repetition." The Times also listed four falsehoods spoken by Trump about critics and the media; eight erroneous claims about Clinton, and six "stump speech" falsehoods. All of this happened during a single week, the newspaper said.

The Sunday LA Times ran a piece by Michael Finnegan under the headline, "Scope of Trump's falsehoods unprecedented for a modern presidential candidate."

The Sunday Washington Post ran a piece by Michael Kranish, Jose A. DelReal and Sean Sullivan headlined "Trump's week reveals bleak view, dubious statements in 'alternative universe.'"

Politico wrote that, for a week in mid-September, "We subjected every statement made by both the Republican and Democratic candidates--in speeches, in interviews and on Twitter--to our magazine's rigorous fact-checking process. The conclusion is inescapable: Trump's mishandling of facts and propensity for exaggeration so greatly exceed Clinton's as to make the comparison almost ludicrous."