The media narrative coming out of 2012 helped create Trump

[Beet]

The media helped Trump tremendously in the past year in multiple ways. It gave him blanket coverage in the GOP primary, enabling him to leap past his opponents. It gave him greater coverage in the General Election, and it gave grossly disproportionate coverage to Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal, to the point where voters heard more about that, than anything else about her. This tanked her trustworthiness ratings and ultimately cost her the election.

But there is another, underappreciated way in which the media created Trump. Coming out of the 2012 election, from election night coverage onward (as soon as Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina were slow to be called) the media created a narrative, sustained for three and a half years, that Obama's re-election was due to the minority vote, and the Democrats could rely on a racial "demographic dividend." I believe this encouraged both Republican and Democratic elites and bases, to all see partisan politics through racial/ethnic lenses.

Some Republican base voters concluded that Hispanics would always vote against them, and that thus stopping Hispanic immigration was a necessary prerequisite that they needed to win elections. While Democratic elites concluded that they could coast on their "new coalition" and forgot the white working class that delivered the Midwest to Obama.

In summer 2016, the New York Times abruptly reversed itself, but by then it was too late.

[Ljube]

I don't know about all of that, but I maintained that the email scandal was a real scandal that would never go away and likely cost Clinton the election.