Trump win triggers media soul-searching

WASHINGTON: The American news media, kicked around by Donald Trump for months, is now kicking itself over how it handled the 2016 presidential election.

How did journalists fail to see the Republican surging to victory? Did the "free publicity" a fascinated media gave Trump early on help him gain momentum? And did Trump´s feuding with news organisations boost him with a public deeply distrustful of the media?

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan called the 2016 campaign "an epic fail" for the news media.

"To put it bluntly, the media missed the story," she wrote. "In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different.