It will come as no surprise that in July of this year, when he first surged in the national polls, Donald Trump received a substantial amount of media coverage. As the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination at that time — polling ahead of all others with between 20 and 30 percent of the vote — one would expect he received more coverage than any of the others.
What one might not expect is that during that month, Trump got more than twice as much coverage as all of the other Republican hopefuls combined.
But that’s what happened in both July and August on the three major evening network news broadcasts. In September, Trump had to settle for merely getting more airtime than all of the other candidates combined, a mere 56 percent of the total time spent on the GOP race on the evening network news. In October, the situation became less ridiculous. Trump, still carrying roughly a quarter of the Republican vote in most national polls, received just 39 percent of the airtime dedicated to the 17 candidates.
These numbers come from a study by the Media Research Center of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news programs. The data go a long way toward explaining how Trump has dominated the GOP field despite spending almost nothing to promote himself. Trump’s largest campaign expense so far seems to be those red “Make America Great Again” hats, which he sells voters in exchange for modest campaign contributions. He hasn’t had to spend anything promoting his name or his image, because everyone else is doing the work for him.
As the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard put it, the media and not the voters are winnowing the GOP field.
For his own part, Trump is deservedly proud of how far he’s come on the free media bus. He had planned to spend $15 million on TV ads over the summer, but he recognized that all of the news coverage made it unnecessary.
“I’ve gotten so much free advertising, it’s like nothing I’d have expected,” he told The New York Times, explaining his decision not to buy airtime. As he boasted on ABC’s “This Week,” “I’m number one in virtually every poll and I spent less money than any other candidate that’s running.”
No one can reasonably blame Trump for recognizing what all of the circus coverage has done for him. But voters of both parties should be a bit upset at the journalists who have been turning this race into a frivolous Donald Trump reality show.
Whether their motive is something as simple as ratings profiteering, or a fascination with Trump’s larger-than-life personality, or even something as sinister as the sabotage of the Republican Party, the television news — both cable and network — didn’t spend this summer illuminating where the candidates stand, or finding skeletons in their closets, or introducing voters to their careers and ideas. Instead, they served as a Trump super PAC. Now they will have to make up for lost time as February and the Iowa caucuses rapidly approach.
