The major media outlets were looking outright deceptive from my perspective.

I had some CNBC shows saved on my Tivo and I recently went back to look at what they were saying. Here's an extreme example of the deception. Just the day before the election CNBC was showing states such as Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota as "leaning" GOP, not "likely" GOP. But here are the results for those states:

   Montana      Trump 57% Clinton 36%
   North Dakota Trump 64% Clinton 28%
   South Dakota Trump 61% Clinton 32%

From this one could easily conclude that the mainstream media deliberately chose to deceive about the expected outcome in those states. Why? Perhaps to not show as much dark red on the national map?

Yes there were true battlegrounds or toss-ups. E.g. Florida only went for Trump by about 1.3%. But there were more than 2x as many Trump voters than Clinton voters in North Dakota. It was a bald-faced brazen lie to call that "leaning".