No one can really question the net worth of Donald Trump’s free media coverage.
It’s nearly $2 billion, according to mediaQuant, a data research firm that assigns values to the media performance of brands and organizations. The New York Times has more:
It’s evident that Trump has saturated all of these sources. The Media Research Center has found that he owns the big three networks’ nightly news coverage, likely to the pleasure of at least one network executive, CBS’s Les Moonves, who said last month that Trump is good for business. Trump’s constant phone interviews on cable news — an uncommon practice — have become common. And while his Twitter feed may have 10 times fewer followers than Barack Obama’s, no one has been able to create news on the medium like he has.
Add it all up, and the dollar value of Trump’s free media coverage outweighs that of all the other major candidates, Democrat or Republican, combined. During the presidential campaign, Trump has earned $1.90 billion of free media. That same measure is $746 million for Hillary Clinton, and the only other candidates to exceed $300 million are Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz.
mediaQuant also gauges monthly media performance of all the candidates, producing a top-line “media rating” that captures the various measures of coverage. Trump was a 98 out of 100 in February, better than each of his competitors. And the “sentiment breakout”, which the company uses to define what percentage of the rating was positive or negative, is heavily in his favor.
It was 91 percent positive and 9 percent negative, even better than Clinton.
