While Hillary Clinton and her buddies in the Democratic Party certainly took quite a bruising to the backside courtesy of the American voter in 2016, they weren’t the only ones getting a chastised.

The hardest spanking was delivered to the mainstream media who abandoned journalistic integrity long ago and have interjected thick doses of liberalism into their news coverage in an attempt to sway audiences to move even further to the political left.

It was this behavior that drove millions and millions of people to seek information and news from alternative sources and eventually led to the sharp rebuke of Trump’s election.

Unfortunately, the media aren’t made up of the sharpest tools in the shed as they have continued doing the same exact things they were doing before, even going so far as to amp it up a few notches.

And it’s still not going well for them. In fact, a new Monmouth University poll has found 77 percent of Americans think traditional media outlets are reporting “fake news.”

The Daily Caller is reporting:

According to a new Monmouth University poll, 77 percent of Americans believe that traditional TV and print news outlets report “fake news.”

31 percent said outlets report fake news “regularly,” while 46 percent said they do so “occasionally.”

The poll also asked respondents to indicate if they think outlets report fake news in order to push an agenda or if they do so on accident because of poor fact checking measures. 42 percent believe outlets were pushing an agenda, while just 26 percent think they did not fact check their stories adequately.

Respondents were even more likely to believe that online outlets “regularly” or “occasionally” report fake news — 86 percent believe this is the case.

The lesson that mainstream media outlets ought to learn from both Trump’s election and this poll is that people are sick and tired of being spoon fed what to think. The average American viewer/reader does not want the news media to do their thinking for them.

All they want is the cold, hard facts, delivered to them with honesty and integrity. The citizens of our country are more than able to make up their own minds about the issues of the day. They don’t need the newspaper man loading their brains full of ideological positions.

When they return to upholding high standards of journalism, they’ll see the faith of the people restored to their outlets. If they refuse to get with the program, they’ll eventually die out.