The elite media -- self-absorbed but not self-aware

Don't they see that they're acting like sore losers who are now actively trying to ensure the failure of a president they never supported in the first place?

All of which is ironic, given that the nation's major media companies spent much of the last part of 2015 boosting Trump's campaign by giving him more than $1 billion of free air time and kneecapping his main Republican rivals -- Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush. In the end, the media bigwigs got the dream matchup they really wanted: Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. They cleaned up in terms of ad revenues and new subscriptions. Then the plan was to take out Trump, and elect Clinton. How did that work out, people?

When CNN President Jeff Zucker said during a recent interview for that blue-collar everyman broadcast, The New Yorker Radio Hour, that Fox News was "state-run TV," I thought he was kidding.

Where was this concern for journalistic objectivity during the eight years of the Obama administration, or during the 19 months that Clinton ran for president, when many CNN personalities -- including reporters and anchors who should play it straight -- defended President Obama and Clinton against GOP criticism more times than not.

Remember how so many of them were so quick to shrug off Obama's horrid record of deporting scores of illegal immigrants? Or the speed with which they concluded that Clinton did nothing wrong when she set up a private email server and then used it to transmit classified material?

Was that CNN acting as "state-run TV"?

Now that Trump is president, you can turn to just about any channel -- absent Fox News -- and hear reporters and anchors accusing Trump or other administration officials of outright lying or pursuing policies that will hurt people -- or, in the case of the GOP health care bill, actually kill them.

During Sunday's edition of ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," that bill was a main topic of conversation as five liberals -- Stephanopoulos, center-right Republican strategist Matthew Dowd, NPR correspondent Cokie Roberts, journalist Roland Martin, and former Obama administration Treasury Department official Steven Rattner -- all piled on the token conservative: GOP strategist Sara Fagen. And to think, liberals love to talk about fairness.

The media say they want to be transparent. Well, it worked. In the Trump era, most Americans can see right through them.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.