A new report found presidential candidate Donald Trump was TV’s most newsworthy man of the year in 2015.
Tyndall’s Year in Review summary concluded the billionaire was the subject of 327 stories on the country’s top TV networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — making him the second-most popular topic of the year on evening news programs.
Trump’s rise to GOP front-runner over the past seven months may be due in part to his policy stances on issues that also received significant coverage last year.
Terrorism was ranked the third most popular topic last year. Syrian refugees, the Islamic State and the American southern border’s security — all sub-topics of terrorism — were key components of Trump’s speeches.
Last year’s presidential election coverage was also one for the record books. It outranked every other pre-election year in the past 25 years, except for 2007.
The three networks produced 1,031 evening news stories on election coverage, just 4 percent less than 2007’s 1,072 and more than seven times the 146 stories in 1991.
Foreign policy saw less than half its annual amount of coverage, which is also standard for the year preceding a national election.
