Anybody who blinked after the 2016 election likely missed all the "soul-searching" the news media said it so desperately needed.

When Trump launched his campaign in the summer of 2015, journalists said he was a racist windbag going nowhere.

In September of that year the New York Times literally ran the headline, "Donald Trump is not going anywhere."

A few months into 2016, Trump was clearing the Republican field and the national media were finally admitting that they missed something. (About half the voters, but better late than never.)

In an appearance on CNN last March, Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch said that "too much of our, at least, mainstream elite media news coverage is driven by columnists and pundits who aren't out in the field. They're talking to the consultant class at places like the Capital Grille and [with] consultants who are fighting the last war, who expected Trump to collapse."

Times columnist David Brooks wrote that month that the media "expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. He said that for him as a journalist, "It's a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I'm going to report accurately on this country."

On Election Day, after two years of journalists telling the public that Trump would lose, the opposite happened.

In a tone of deep remorse, CNN's media reporter Brian Stelter told his audience the following Sunday that it was "one of the biggest media failures in many years" and that reporters should accept that the public would lose confidence in the press.

"So, we on the other side of this screen over here have to reckon with that," he said, "not just for a week or two but for the long term."

This new enlightenment didn't make it through the commercial break.

News media have made no changes in how they operate, even as a man with no experience in public office just rode a populist wave to the world's top job.

Trump single-handedly reoriented the political landscape and shone a light on a massive portion of the electorate that the media had long forgotten.

Maybe some changes to the press are in order.

Nah!

"We're covering this president as we've covered presidents in the past," Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron bragged to the website Business Insider last week. "We haven't changed how we do our jobs."

In that spirit, the Post's editorial board in late January compared Trump to Hitler.

If there is one thing everyone will remember years from now about Trump's campaign, it was his promise to restrict illegal immigration. Contrary to the opinion of Times' columnist Nicholas Kristof, who compared taking a pause on taking in Syrian refugees to the internment of Japanese Americans, a more orderly and selective immigration policy is pretty popular.

But after one illegal immigrant who had been living in the U.S. for decades using a fraudulent Social Security number was deported last week, all three network prime-time newscasts put together packages on "the family she leaves behind" (CBS correspondent Carter Evans' words).

Trump's message to "Make America Great Again" (or as the media recall it, "The End Times") was powerful enough to overcome the minor controversies and tiffs that journalists covered so extensively.

It behooves the Times or the Post to get a writer who sees something good about Trump's appeal and the people who support him.

Instead we get Charles Blow who twice each week thinks he's making a smart and principled statement by referring to Trump as "president" in quotes.

We get Buzzfeed's top editor, Ben Smith, offering that for the media to cover Trump thoroughly, it may sometimes require "publishing unverified information."

That's not fake news. He said that after his website was torched for publishing the now infamous dossier of unsubstantiated claims about Trump's personal and financial life.

To admit a readiness to repeat that episode requires more soul-searching. Maybe the media will find something next time.

Eddie Scarry is a media reporter for the Washington Examiner. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.