Well a big part of the campaign was delegitimizing the establishment as "fake news" that is in bed with Hillary. Combined with a bombardment of headlines that confirm their biases, targeted by personality, it could have a big impact.
This would've been far less effective if CNN wasn't caught red-handed cheating at the debates, then lying about it afterward. In my view, we need news with less opinions and more facts, better sourcing, and more complete coverage and no rumors allowed.
Then again, I think the CS Monitor was founded more or less to confront the original plague of yellow journalism and somehow they've vanished without a trace from Google News, which always tries to feed me the clickbait versions of every story, despite the fact that I don't click on those.
So maybe the real problem here is that the market has spoken and people prefer junk food news? A depressing thought :/
Trump administration continue to delegitimize mainstream news, and call it "fake news".
The media didn't give Trump free publicity because they love him; a lot (perhaps most) of that coverage was negative. It was good for ratings, though, and I think that's something Trump understood and took full advantage of. The long term consequences of this is that it was a contributing factor to Trump winning the primary and later the general election, but also many progressives and independents that previously saw the media as a benign entity have adopted the default assumption that every news article is either a veiled advertisement, a stunt to raise viewership, or propaganda with some motive other than informing the public.
(I think the Trump supporters and Tea Party types have mostly already believed this, so whatever they think of the media being pro-Hillary, it's something they believed all along; nothing changed there.)
This puts a large proportion of the public in the awkward position of wanting to know what's going on in the world, but having no reliable source of facts since the major players have largely disqualified themselves. Hence the rise in fake news, but fake news is just a symptom of a general lack of trust (deserved, in my opinion) of the so-called mainstream media.
And so, the media join a long list of important institutions that are perceived by many (including myself) to either be in decline or have somehow gone off the rails, including Congress, the court system, the police (in some areas), intelligence agencies, higher education, the democratic process, the major political parties, the financial services industry, unions, and so on. I know it's practically an American tradition to believe that society is falling apart and that we're on the verge of catastrophe, but still, it seems like we've got more things than usual coming apart at once and no obvious fix for any of them within reach. I would have felt a little better if Clinton had prevailed, but still there's a lot of problems I'm concerned about that are deeper and have been around a lot longer than the election of president Trump.
Does your use of "their" mean that you think your own side of politics isn't exactly the same?