A protest vote against blaming the media for Trump

To say the media missed some seismic shift in American political culture goes too far. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; President Barack Obama’s approval rating is sky high; and the winning GOP candidate this cycle received fewer votes than his losing predecessor in 2012. National journalists filed so many dispatches from Trump country that the genre coalesced into a recurring joke on Twitter. That reporting came in addition to strong and copious accountability work that exposed Trump as a grifter who jokes about sexual assault and Clinton as a uninspiring politician surrounded by a shady personal network.

This is a column about reviewing campaign journalism, however, so here goes: The performance of “the media” in 2016 was…mixed.