WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Among the many postmortems that will follow this bizarre presidential campaign will be the one dissecting how the mainstream media missed the story from beginning to end.

The major press organizations so aptly characterized as the “lamestream media” by Sarah Palin in 2008 seem intent on confirming Bernie Sanders’s charge in this campaign that the “corporate” and “establishment media” is ensnared in a fundamental conflict of interest.

After first dismissing Donald Trump as a joke candidate, the press then went overboard giving him nonstop coverage even while maintaining an establishment bias that he must be stopped at all costs, quickly adopting Ted Cruz as the establishment alternative even though he is just as wacky as Trump and considerably less accomplished.

Bernie Sanders continues to rake in fundraising cash

But it is the treatment of Sanders that will go down as a black mark on American journalism, especially if he pulls off the political upset he has forecast and dethrones Hillary Clinton on the way to her coronation as Democratic nominee.

“If Donald Trump weren’t dominating the coverage in this election, Bernie Sanders would be the big story,” CNN political commentator Sally Kohn observed last week. “Whether he wins or not, I expect the biggest part of Sanders’s legacy will be a generation of engaged, honest and bold leaders who work within government and not just outside and against it.”

In a series of blogs in Huffington Post, Seth Abramson of the University of New Hampshire accuses the mainstream media of missing the momentum shift in the Democratic race that he dates back to the beginning of March.

“The Democratic primary race changed fundamentally — indeed, radically — after March 1st,” he wrote last week, “and the national media’s failure to register this and work it into their polling, projections, and punditry is one of the most wide-ranging, public, and ultimately influential journalistic failures of the last decade.”

Abramson argues that analysis of actual election-day polling — discounting early voting and reflecting changes in voter stances as the campaigns have their impact — shows the gap between Sanders and Clinton is much narrower than the total figures would indicate.

“The point here is that Hillary Clinton has been losing the primary for a month now in votes cast after the race began to favor Sanders on March 5th,” Abramson contends. “This means that most of the projections the media is making about how Bernie Sanders will do going forward are based on election results, exit polls, and voter surveys compiled before that critical March 5th date.”

Most polling now gives Sanders the nod in this week’s Wisconsin primary and shows him narrowing the gap in New York to just 10 points in the April 19 primary from the 40-some-point lead Clinton enjoyed in earlier polls.

Equally telling is that Sanders’s fundraising continues to set new records, with March’s $44 million topping the previous record of $43.5 million in February and well ahead of Clinton’s $29.5 million in March and $30 million in February.

And yet mainstream reporting continues to tout the Clinton campaign line that the contest is virtually over, with the New York Times this week running what amounts to an obituary for the Sanders campaign as its front page lead.

In the campaign for that critical New York vote — Clinton can scarcely afford to lose the state that elected her twice to the Senate — the Democratic frontrunner lost her composure with an aggressive response to a Greenpeace activist that was captured on video and immediately went viral.

When Eva Resnick-Day, the activist, asked Clinton if she would reject fossil-fuel donations for the rest of her campaign, Clinton retorted, “I do not have — I have money from people who work for fossil fuel companies. I am so sick—”

Resnick-Day interjected, “Yeah, and registered lobbyists.”

Ignoring this interjection, Clinton began jabbing her finger at the younger woman, raising her voice to be heard above the crowd on the rope line, “I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me! I’m sick of it!”

And yet the fact that she has received $4.5 million from lobbyists, bundlers and large donors in the fossil-fuel industry is easily verifiable and at odds with Clinton’s claim that she has received $330,000 from individuals who work for the companies. (A misleading claim in any case, since donations from employees, whose interests presumably are aligned with those of the company, are commonly lumped together with other industry contributions in analyzing campaign donors.)

It’s too early to tell whether this could become her 47% moment — the clandestine video that tripped up the 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney for claiming that nearly half the country’s population is mooching off the government — but it certainly puts her in an unflattering light and won’t do anything to boost her trustworthiness or likability.

A recent poll of Democratic primary voters by Bloomberg politics already found that Sanders leads Clinton on trustworthiness by a massive 64% to 25%.

It was that same poll, not coincidentally, that found Sanders had edged out Clinton as the Democrats’ first choice for presidential candidate, 49% to 48%. Plus, there is the now familiar story of how Sanders outperforms Clinton in matchups against Republican contenders.

Abramson contends that Democrats will lose the race for the White House if they nominate Clinton — because Trump will not be the Republican nominee and she is vulnerable in a race against Ted Cruz or John Kasich, especially since hostility towards her will help reunite the Republican Party.

But worst of all, Abramson says, is that in the 20 polls on Clinton’s favorability rating so far this year, she has come out with a negative rating in all of them, with 17 of them in double digits.

“The problem here,” he wrote this week, “is that the RealClearPolitics history shows that Clinton only becomes more unpopular the more hotly contested an election is.”

The trajectory for the Democratic frontrunner, in short, does not look great, but you would never know it from reading the mainstream media’s smug spin.