Covering Trump

Trump gets more media coverage, especially at CNN

It’s not surprising to see Donald Trump getting more media coverage than other candidates, but it is a bit surprising where that advantage is coming from.

One of the things we know is associated with candidate success in primaries is the amount of media coverage they receive. This makes sense, of course — name-recognition is vitally important to candidate success, and one can’t have name-recognition without coverage. But it’s not completely obvious which way that works. Yes, media attention can cause candidates to do better, but also the media will devote more attention to candidates they expect to do well while ignoring those expected to do poorly. And a lot of that coverage can be quite negative.

I’ve been tracking media attention to the Republican presidential candidates with the help of the GDELT Online News Summary. This dataset, on a very basic level, allows us to see the percentage of news pieces at a given news outlet that mentioned a particular candidate.

The figure below shows the percentage of news coverage for the top five Republican presidential candidates (in terms of coverage) in all available national TV news sources each day since the 2022 midterm elections. Not surprisingly, Trump completely dominates coverage, and had two particular spikes — his indictment in Manhattan in early April and his federal indictment in early June. Ron DeSantis is clearly in a distant second place for coverage but roughly matched Trump’s coverage on May 24th, the day he announced for president.

The search engine, however, allows us to drill down to individual news networks. Here’s what coverage of Trump looks like across both CNN and Fox News:

As we can discern, the green solid line (CNN) is regularly well above the red dashed line (Fox). And in fact across the whole time series, Trump coverage on CNN is an average of 1.5 points above the Fox News level — Trump is mentioned 1-2 percentage points more often on CNN than he is on Fox, and this is statistically significant (p ≤ .001). That difference is a bit smaller if we exclude Trump’s May 10th town hall on CNN, but not by much.

What about DeSantis? Actually, the levels of coverage are almost identical across networks, with CNN coverage just a non-significant 0.1 percent greater than Fox News coverage.

Trump has, of course, frequently called CNN “fake news” and suggested that they owe any financial successes to covering him. It’s hard to know just from these charts what the reason for the difference in Trump coverage is. It could be, as we’ve learned about CNN, recently-ousted CEO Chris Licht was seeking a more conservative audience, possible with greater Trump coverage. Conversely, we could interpret this as Fox News under-covering Trump in an era with a lot of bad news being generated about him.

But to the extent media coverage is driving the presidential nomination contest, it is clear it is not just coming from the right.