It wasn’t just Democrats who were defeated in the 2016 election. The mainstream media heard Americans loud and clear as well. Their message: please stop the bias.

One outlet hearing an unusually large number of complaints is The New York Times. Public editor Liz Spayd said the paper has received “five times the normal level” of complaints “and the pace has only just recently tapered off,” as noted over at Legal Insurrection.

In a recent op-ed, Spayd said the Grey Lady wouldn’t be doing any “chest thumping” after a recent “subscriber bump” and promised that it is taking “a hard-eyed look at coverage.”

“Because from my conversations with readers, and from the emails that have come into my office,” Spayd wrote, “I can tell you there is a searing level of dissatisfaction out there with many aspects of the coverage.”

Among the complaints Spayd has received included the paper’s obvious bias toward Hillary Clinton; not only over Donald Trump but also shutting out Bernie Sanders supporters. Cindy Capwell was named as one complainant who was upset that the Times portrayed all Trump supporters as racists, misogynists, and homophobic by focusing only “on Trump’s most extreme supporters.”

But it wasn’t just Republicans or independents who complained, liberals joined the chorus, too, which surprised Spayd:

Few could deny that if Trump’s more moderate supporters are feeling bruised right now, the blame lies partly with their candidate and his penchant for inflammatory rhetoric. But the media is at fault too, for turning his remarks into a grim caricature that it applied to those who backed him. What struck me is how many liberal voters I spoke with felt so, too. They were Clinton backers, but, they want a news source that fairly covers people across the spectrum…

WHAT struck me most as I spoke with readers is how much, to a person, they had something to say that was smart and reasonable. They weren’t randomly selected — I chose them from an inbox of complaints — but they had reactions that were well worth hearing. I found myself wishing someone from the newsroom was on the line with me, especially to hear how many of the more liberal voters wanted more balanced coverage. Not an echo chamber of liberal intellectualism, but an honest reflection of reality.

Legal Insurrection included a similar response from CBS News reporter Will Rahn whose op-ed also accepted blame on behalf of all media for its “smugness” of being “#WithHer:”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.