Now today, we realize that it has no effect on the average voter.
This is a shocking realization if your are a journalist working for a newspaper. It is a "Emperor's New Clothes" moment. For the rest of us, I would say this has less an impact.
The funny thing is once the election was over, suddenly a slew of articles came from WaPo talking about how Bernie may have had gotten short changed from the primaries and how they may have affected the election, be it preventing him from facing Trump or dividing the Democratic voter base. Like, only NOW does this newspapers care about Bernie. A lot of supporters for Sanders won't forget the treatment he got from the Washington Post.
Plus, in the case of Trump, his anti-establishment rhetoric may have meant it worked in his favor to not get endorsements from the media elite.
(I thought reporting the latter was over-aggressive. It was anonymous, uncorroborated data from arguably the most dubious possible source, Russian intelligence.)
* Fox News and other Fox/Murdoch publications world wide claim to be traditional news organizations, but really are editorializing. Ironically, this undermines the reputation of real news organizations - people assume they do the same.
* Many on the right now value ideology over fact. Information that fits the ideology is accepted; inconvenient fact is not. Climate change, Obama's citizenship (doubted by 40% of Republicans, IIRC), and Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD are simple examples.
* The demonization of any information that doesn't fit the ideology has resulted in the right continually demonizing real news organizations, who report based on fact and not ideology.
I'm not writing that to be partisan. There is a critical problem on the right that is destroying society, democracy and civilization, and an attitude that they are not stewards of those things - as if there is no consequence. If it was happening also on the left then I'd say the same, but it's not.
Which suggests you don't read either of the latter, for they do that all the time. Just go to Drudge right now and see the links at the top left to the NYT, LA Times, the U.K. Metro which I just learned about yesterday as an example of the MSM over there (haven't looked at it yet), The Hill (founded 1994 and pretty "traditional" nowadays), CNET (founded in 1994 as well), the Daily Mail, and ABC and CBS News. This is Drudge's daily bread and butter.
And for now, just take my word for it that Breitbart not only publishes a lot of AP, AFP etc. new wire stories straight, a lot of their items are short sections of traditional outlets with some commentary, links to them and encouragement to read the whole thing.
Newspapers also used to be local organs, owned by the local upper class, staffed with the local working class, covering news that people could check against their lived experience.
Nowadays newspapers are heavily nationalized and internationalized, owned by media conglomerates, and staffed with the kind of upper-class white-collar professionals who could afford many years of unpaid internships before getting a paid job. The information printed may even be veridical, but it's often not checkably veridical, so it gets down-weighted and mixed in with all the other uncheckable shit you read on the internet.