Smug and pompous before the election in predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris would beat President-elect Donald Trump, reporters from outlets including the Washington Post, CNN, and Politico are seeking to stanch the exodus of their audience before it leads to layoffs or even bankruptcy.

“The world feels upended,” Politico Playbook co-author and White House correspondent Eugene Daniels said, conceding that the media blew the election, especially in writing off Trump supporters.

“You know, everyone that voted for Donald Trump is not someone that was like, ‘You know what? I hate black people. I hate brown people.’ And the idea that you would just, and this is something that ends up happening in D.C. a lot, is like, ‘Well, that’s why it’s like —’ But it’s like, no, there may be something else there. And that lack of imagination is, I think, where we have failed as an industry to serve the people who we’re trying to get to come back. And the only way to do that is to, like, you know, come back hat in hand and be like, ‘Please, please, we’ll listen to you this time,’” added Daniels, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, when asked what he missed in his coverage, said with laughter, “I missed the result. I got that wrong.”

And CNN’s Abby Phillip said the election showed that reporters were writing for themselves. “I think that I have observed that elites increasingly talk only to each other and come to believe that, because there is consensus among them, that that consensus is shared broadly,” she said.

The reporters were among several who spoke at postelection events last week at Harvard University’s Kennedy School Institute of Politics. While there were no apologies for the dead-wrong coverage, there was a consensus that the political press play “groupthink,” or what used to be called pack journalism.

While the makeup of the media is unlikely to change after the election despite the industry hand-wringing, the reporters blamed a lack of intellectual diversity and backgrounds in the political press corps for pushing the anti-Trump, pro-Harris storyline.

Robinson told of how newsrooms used to be full of “working-class” reporters, many without college degrees.

“But now, you know, the Washington Post is, you come in, and there’s a whole bunch of really smart, you know, educated, beautifully educated people who, by and large, sort of grew up in the same kinds of neighborhoods and went to the same, you know, elite universities and got really good grades, and so, yeah, there’s a kind of groupthink,” he said.

“There’s an internal diversity that I think we have lost,” added Robinson, a regular on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Phillip told her student audience that Democrats suffer from elitism and that the Republicans are now more representative of America.

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“We as a society need to find better ways to uplift divergent voices. Otherwise, we will be victims of groupthink. And there is an activist class. I think this is particularly acute in the Democratic Party right now. There is an activist class in the Democratic Party that is multiracial, multiethnic. It is diverse. But it’s an activist class, and so because of that, they’re not able to see outside of that. And Republicans had the same problem before Trump, the Heritage Foundations of the world, et cetera, right? They had the same issue, fundamental issue, but Trump kind of broke them out of it. Democrats are in that place now where they have to break out of it. And I think it is a real problem,” she said.

Politico’s Daniels went so far as to admit, “We don’t know everything.”