The failure of the media in 2016 was written off as a fluke. They wanted to pretend that Donald Trump snuck up on them, and that there were always warning signs, and caveats, and so on. This time around, their hubris was even more evident, confidently projecting outcomes that never came.
The fact that this election turned out to come down to the wire is a stunning rebuke of both the mainstream polling industry and the media in general. Across the board it appears that major pollsters got state after state wrong, and often by large margins.