During the election there was numerous claims that the media was biased.
Supporters of Hillary Clinton claimed that the media was biased against her by focusing excessively on the story of her e-mails, digging up past scandals, and attempting to deliberately create a "horse race" narrative that didn't exist.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders claimed through the primaries that the media was biased against him by portraying him as an extremist, overestimating Clinton's delegate lead, and giving him insufficient coverage.
Supporters of Drumpf, of course, continue to argue the media was biased against him. During the GOP primaries his various challengers frequently complained about the free air time Drumpf received from the media.
So which was it?
The final result in the NPV was 48-46. If anything, the media tried to propagate a landslide narrative despite polls showing the opposite. Except for a couple weeks in October, Clinton never really led the polls by more than 1976 Carter/2012 Obama margins.
And as Nate Silver pointed out, even though Clinton's lead looked a lot like Obama's lead in 2012, you had to pick apart the numbers carefully to see that the number of undecideds (and where those undecideds resided) in 2016 made Clinton's victory way less certain than Obama's was in 2012.
I agree. I'm saying that I remember MSM frequently predicting a 1980/1996-style blowout for Hillary, despite polls being fairly close for much of 2016. She was the favorite for most of the cycle, but polls mostly indicated a 2004/2012-style victory. The OP stated that some people claim the media created a horse race, but that simply isn't true. If anything, they tried to discourage Trump supporters from voting by brainwashing people that the election was in the bag for Hillary.
With a quick "buh her emails" and "shame there isn't someone much better than Trump" as a nice aside right afterwards.
And this did no favors towards youth or black turnout, especially the latter.
