The Washington Post media guy, Erik Wemple, agrees that coverage of the Trump-Clinton race was screwed up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/08/25/studies-agree-media-gorged-on-hillary-clinton-email-coverage/
But then he throws up his hands and says, "What can you do?"
News organizations might consider looking back and evaluating their roles in contributing to the Clinton email pile-on, though countermeasures will be difficult. That’s because instituting restraint in covering big stories grinds against the entire ethos of journalism in the Internet age, which preaches the virtues of publish, publish, publish, even when you have very little to say.
So, look for similar results the next time an outsider with a deep history of unethical, outrageous, misogynistic and racist conduct takes on a career Washington insider.
What if a competitor, call it The New York World, had the same resources as the Washington Post or the New York Times but was build on the business model of selling newspapers to Democrats like me? I wouldn't want them to lie. I wouldn't want them to ignore the most serious problems with Democratic candidates. But I would want them to ignore bullshit problems with Democratic candidates, as Matt Yglesias notes:
In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.
I would want them to not repeat lies about Democratic candidates, as explored in 2007 in a Vanity Fair retrospective on the 2000 election:
Eight years ago, in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger, a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."
How did this happen? ...Were the liberal elite bending over backward to prove they weren't so liberal?
The New York Times could continue to market itself to people who wanted to read garbage stories about Hillary. But I would be able to read a newspaper that didn't seem to hate me.