The only part of the media that has made a real attempt to be fair and unbiased is the print media.
In the past, this meant speaking both of the positives and negatives for both Obama and Trump. While all stories are shaped by the values and biases of the writer, the intent of most of that media was an attempt to be honest and fair. While it is true that the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune lean right, their news pages are fact based.
In 2016, they had the challenge of Trump being far out of the norm and really NOT having many, if any, positives. The mainstream PRINT media did a laudable job with both the NYT and the WP (and surprisingly the New Yorker) jumping out of their complacency and writing very serious detailed exposes on Trump. This includes the NYT covering in detail his seedy youth where his family sent him to military school, his early work for his father violating the law to deny blacks apartments and then, when forced to, approving blacks for a few buildings that slumlord Trump allowed to deteriorate, and his tax return for a year where he took a gigantic loss. The WP had extensive coverage of his casinos going bankrupt, his Miss Universe problems etc. Manafort's links to Russian allied Ukrainians was also well documented.
I suspect that if we could look at people who obtained most of their information from the newspapers, we would find that Trump not just less well than HRC, but that he did less well than the typical Republican candidate. This speculation is based on the number of prominent Republicans who said they could not vote for him. TV, radio, and many internet sites did not even pretend to be unbiased.
An additional problem for TV is their concern with the bottom line. In all years since at least 2000, TV cable news and network news had become a "profit center" rather than the traditional cost justified by the prestige brought to the networks. Where newspapers still held to journalistic goals, TV news has become all about ratings. The evening shows - whether on the left (MSNBC) or the right(FOX) - were speaking mostly to their own "base". Trump, the brightly colored clown from reality TV, was given huge blocks of completely unfiltered time to spread his message on every cable station. We watched it and while, many of us complained about the amount of time he got for free, we thought he was so over the top he was destroying any credibility he had.
Let me explain the clown comment - as it was not just name calling. Only after seeing this snarky GQ makeover( http://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-presidential-makeover ) after the election did I realize that Trump's look was probably strategic. After the made over Trump looks sort of like the bland Kasich; the badly dressed, gaudy Trump stands out. With the orange face, weird hair, over-sized suit and huge bright red tie he shares something with clowns. A friend of mine, whose grandmother was an early clown with Ringling Brothers explained in a talk that every clown had his or her own "face". It was as if was trademarked. No other clown would copy it and they themselves laboriously recreated their clown persona daily. If all of us were asked to close our eyes and picture Trump, I would bet the image we bring to mind is nearly identical - and it looks like no one we have e=seen in real life.
In Trump's case, he stayed close enough to how a candidate should look, while looking different enough to stand out vs the 16 other Republicans. I suspect that Trump's badly fitting suits, his about 4th grade language, and his simplistic sloganing of messages many already had been sold by the right wing echo chamber, he completely connected with many people who felt alienated from the elite, who they thought looked down on them. This in spite of having grown up richer than any Democratic candidate possibly back to JFK or FDR! (Hillary Clinton certainly was not given a million dollar stake upon graduating from college - later upped to $14 million when that was not enough. Neither were Obama, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale, Carter .... ) Yet his supporters perceived him as not of the elite - and his lack of morals and manners likely made that true to some degree. They saw our rejection of Trump as similar to our (supposed) "rejection" of them actually reinforcing their bond with him.
A TV media was concerned with ratings and being entertaining - leading to the outrageous Trump getting endless hours of free coverage. They even covered a Melania speech - essentially a redo of her plagiarized convention speech - live in full on MSNBC in the last month. The problem with most of the TV media is that they LET Trump, already known as a reality tv star, where editing will make a person look better (or worse) than they are - and it was HIS show, have hours to define himself. Even if the rest of the coverage was more realistic and balanced, those hours of self definition were a HUGE finger on the scale.
While Hillary Clinton came into both 2008 and 2016 as likely one of the most known political nominees ever because of her years as first lady, a prominent Senator from day 1 (rare in a body that rewards seniority), and a Secretary of State, you could argue that TV with its seemingly endless coverage of the Trumps defining themselves was paired with balanced TV coverage of HRC. Maybe because HRC was so well known, most of the coverage on her revolved around "news", not biography. There were some biography coverage especially before the convention. The lack of balance on TV could be said to be that Trump, even as he ran for President, was treated as a celebrity and an entertainer, where Clinton was treated pretty much as any previous nominee.
Radio was worse as radio has been progressively more right wing dominated since at least 1996. Other than NPR, which is balanced for the most part (but moving right), almost all of the talk show are right wing. A few years ago, my husband and I drove from Vermont to Florida. Once we were south of DC, the stations became increasingly right wing. We listened in both fascination and horror. Even in VT, we have stations carrying Rush Limbaugh and the other name right wingers and the loathsome, Boston based Howie Carr, who my MA friends had long mentioned. One thing that became obvious is that they RW stations (and FOX) had coordinating messages. The charges (then against Obama) were nearly identical, but put into the style and voice of each of these wing nuts. This allows some to feel that hearing the same thing on multiple sources validates it. The problem is that they are in an echo chamber and the sources are not independent.
Had the above covered all the sources of information, it would still have been daunting to get a fair comparison to most of the country. But, that ignores the right wing internet based sources. I have long been surprised at how many non prime sourced articles appear if I google the name of a Democrat. There were times when list would place something like the daily caller or Breitbart ahead of the NYT, the Washington Post, or (on foreign policy) legitimate foreign press. I was also amazed at how often I saw these same RW sources - and worse - on Twitter when I searched any Democrat to see what the stories were. I now know that many of the tweets I saw were likely from Russian bots. Even though my extended (large) family and friends were all voting for HRC, I did see some of the garbage on Facebook - in response to posts made by others with wider circles arguing for Clinton.
I had actually been naive enough to have thought in 2008 and 2012, that these social media tools were our answer to countering the Republican domination of talk radio. Instead last year, it might be that with their willingness to make things completely up - whether distorting the place of Obama's birth or Kerry's heroic service or concocting a strange pizzagate CT - that those tools were more effective spreading lies, than in correcting them.
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