Interesting that you should ask that question. That's the exact question that has been haunting the traditional news sources, and their credibility is now
worse than it has been in years. When the traditional news sources act as if they've become a propaganda arm for the Democrat party, it should be no wonder that they take a major credibility hit. ...and you just keep lapping up the tripe that they publish.
You want to discount this point of view. Fine, don't take it from me. Take it from one of the
media's own:
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.
So, the media decided not to check their biases at the door. They allowed their biases to influence their reporting because there was some sort of "consensus" among journalists that Trump was somehow dangerous, and it would therefore be disingenuous to their readers to leave their biases out of the reporting. As the writer of the article notes:
It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.
Well, when the facts come colored with the reporter's bias, because the reporter has convinced him/herself that their bias is fact, news reporting is no longer news reporting. It's fake news.
You might reply that we should fear Trump. As the article points out:
“If you have a nominee who expresses warmth toward one of our most mischievous and menacing adversaries, a nominee who shatters all the norms about how our leaders treat families whose sons died for our country, a nominee proposing to rethink the alliances that have guided our foreign policy for 60 years, that demands coverage — copious coverage and aggressive coverage,” said Carolyn Ryan, The New York Times’s senior editor for politics. “It doesn’t mean that we won’t vigorously pursue reporting lines on Hillary Clinton — we are and we will.”
Well, there's no responsible person who would look at that comment and call "bullshit" on it. I certainly don't recall the media hyper-ventilating, or providing "copious and aggressive coverage" - to nearly the same degree about Obama's familiarity with the Russians, even when he was
caught on tape. Certainly no one felt that this familiarity should result in questions about Obama's fitness as president.
And was it familiarity with the Russians that caused the administration to
delay reacting to the hacking in the first place? Maybe they didn't want to upset Putin to keep him engaged on Syria? They didn't want to make Vlad mad? Don't see any "copious and aggressive coverage" on Obama's failure to react appropriately to this. Only now, after Hillary has lost, is Obama choosing to make a public display of his dissatisfaction with the Russians...but the media has no problem with this.
And you keep bemoaning the "non-traditional media": Brietbart, etc. Who do you think allowed Breitbart to gain a foothold? Its no coincidence that as the credibility - and market share, and readership, and advertising revenue - of the traditional media has waned, other sources of news have flourished. You might not like their content, but the traditional media has only themselves to blame for giving these news sources market share.