https://reason.com/2020/11/04/media-trump-shy-voters-polls-wrong-election-2020-biden/Quote
Perhaps more importantly, the media continues to be wrong about why Trump is popular, and about which people like him. Unable to admit that a Democratic Party held hostage by liberal arts graduates who write their preferred pronouns on their name tags might be out of touch with the working class voters who traditionally vote blue, many cable news talking heads settled on any number of alternative explanations: from Russian interference to lingering, perhaps resurgent, racism throughout the U.S. (CNN's Van Jones called it a "whitelash" in 2016.)
The notion that Trump was a racist response to Obama is simply a bad understanding of history.
Quote (David Graham @ Atlantic)
Without reliable sources of information about public opinion, the press, and by extension, the public, should perhaps employ a measure of humility about what we can and can't know in politics. As wise as this may be—and even if people manage to act on it—that sort of epistemic humility risks falling prey to the same asymmetrical warfare that has characterized much of the Trump era. At the moment, the leader of the Republican Party is an authoritarian populist who claims to represent the "true" will of the people, despite losing the popular vote twice. The president is unlikely to exercise any such humility in claiming, without evidence, that public opinion is with him. He might be wrong, but without reliable polls, who's to say otherwise?
The media is known, with evidence, to be biased. As a result, Trump is able to claim, without evidence, that any and all bad news is fake news.
Quote
Institutions like The New York Times and The Atlantic have grown much more squeamish about inviting dissenters into their midst. Publications are now occasionally beholden to staffers who think it's the job of journalists to run interference for the Democratic Party and hide stories from readers if they could conceivably help Trump. Many young rising stars in the world of investigative reporting think newsrooms have wrongly prioritized objectivity and should move toward a kind of "moral clarity" that is likely to make their institutions even more confused about why millions of people—roughly half the country—have aligned themselves with Donald Trump.
In some ways this is just a reflection of changing business models, but unless the NYT and others change, they will become irrelevant outside of the small community of leftists to whom they directly cater.