the media would return to normal
This is the new normal for the media. The mainstream media will largely support their candidate, and an opposition fringe media will spring up on the side to support the other candidate. Twitter, blogs, and the like have lowered the bar for what a "journalist" is so much that sensationalism is the norm moreso than ever before. Constant content delivery and altered expectations mean every little thing has to be manufactured into something big and important.
I hate to sound too partisan in a kiwifarms post but if you remember the Bush years and contrast them with the Obama years you will see what I mean. Every week Newsweek and time had a front page article about how awful Bush was, although they tried to portray him as incompetent rather than truly evil. Google changed the search term for "miserable failure" to redirect to the wiki page for Bush. Bush had his followers to be sure, especially after 9/11, which was probably the most solidarity I can recall ever seeing in news media. Bush's image was always that of an honorable man except in the eyes of his strongest detractors; many thought he was an idiot (especially after iraq) but he was not generally seen to be incendiary personally and typically acted very even tempered.
The Obama years were practically nonstop fawning from the mainstream press at large. Of course fringe media belittled him for eight years, some valid, some simply racial in nature, and some insanely conspiratorial and beyond belief. That said fringe media sometimes did do something noteworthy - after all it was the national fucking enquirer that broke the John Edwards story!
The Obama years were also when everyone including your grandparents really got into the internet and social media. Smartphones became commonplace. The quaint blogs of the Bush years seemed to largely give way to media aggregators and alt media outlets. However the overwhelming support in popular media was for Obama and his policies. I don't think many people, especially those who didn't personally support his policies, cared for that. As such we saw fox news, despite the constant portrayals as ultraconservative, become the most popular news outlet, probably because it was the only place to go and not feel totally marginalized by msnbc tier reporting. Even then I think many felt underserved, which has contributed to the total lack of confidence Americans have in the media today. A lack of confidence that I personally believe is warranted...
Even if Trump were gone I wouldn't expect the media to gladhand Pence like Obama or even treat him with the relative dignity afforded to Bush (and at the time many people complained about how universally negative that coverage was, despite a solid economic recovery later in his term).
The cat is out of the bag and while news media in general isn't dead, it's definitely hurting. The constant hunt for the newest and most outrageous Trump news is causes serious fatigue for viewers. I think it's becoming more decentralized as people find the outlets they agree with rather than the big corporations which really aren't representing the average person- and which aren't really telling the news, just essentially retreating Trump tweets. But everybody still wants to scoop everybody and I do not see the situation improving.