I can think of at least TWO life-long Republicans who did the equivalent of "sitting out the election" not because of what the mass media did, but because of what ROMNEY did.
It's wrong to blame Romney's loss on the media. Romney lost because he was amoral, and morality is destiny. American conservatives are still a moral enough people to have rejected him even at the price of getting Obama as a consequence. Voting for Romney would have meant voting FOR homosexual outreach to children, voting FOR nationalized health care, voting FOR pro-abortion thinking, and voting FOR environmentalist tyranny. There was no such thing as voting "against."
That is why Romney lost -- on balance, Americans were too smart and too moral to vote FOR a candidate who would have acted against America's fiscal and moral interests.
Romney was a lot less statist than Obama so I voted for him while you sat on your butt. Democrats will say (about you) objective achieved! They knew millions of guys like you would never vote for Obama so they got you all to do the next best thing