There's been a complete transformation in how the campaign press covers elections in the last decade, and it's a defining change that's benefiting Republicans, and specifically Donald Trump. The change is in the way the press has dramatically curtailed its coverage of policy and of what candidate agendas look like.
Coverage of policy proposals used to be a hallmark of presidential campaign reporting, with journalists outlining what candidates stood for, describing what their presidencies might look like, and comparing and contrasting their platforms with those of their opponents. What would the new president’s top priorities be on the first day of his or her new administration? Policy now takes a backseat to scandals and viral moments from the trail.
"This tendency, in turn, allows important issues such as health care, climate change and reproductive rights to fall off the agenda every time a Trump-driven media cycle emerges from some new outrage or a flavor-of-the-day controversy pops up," according to new research from Northeastern University's School of Journalism. Students in the school's Storybench program recently analyzed 10,000 news articles on the 2020 Democratic candidates published between March and October of this year by a diverse range of 28 news outlets. The study indicates that coverage of the candidates’ positions on immigration and health care flared up during the televised debates, but then quickly subsided once that moment passed. In other words, substantive issues basically disappear when yet another Trump controversy erupts.
"For several generations now, most media coverage of presidential politics has consisted of pack journalism focused on polls and the controversies of the day," the researchers write. "Given the press’ disastrous performance in the 2016 campaign, one might have hoped that it would be different this time around. So far, though, it’s been business as usual, which our analysis helps confirm."
Indeed, we've seen this disappointing act before.
During the 2016 campaign, the three network evening newscasts aired just 32 minutes of in-depth campaign policy reporting. By comparison, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News devoted nearly three times as much coverage to the Hillary Clinton email story (100 minutes).
Here is the breakdown, according to network TV researcher Andrew Tyndall:
ABC: Eight minutes, all of which covered terrorism.
NBC: Eight minutes for terrorism, LBGT issues, and foreign policy.
CBS: 16 minutes for foreign policy, terrorism, immigration, policing, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Note what was missing. No network evening news coverage of trade, health care, climate change, drugs, poverty, guns; no infrastructure, no deficits. Guess what managed to get a ton of media attention: Clinton's emails. In fact, news outlets devoted so much time and space to covering the ginned-up controversy that they simply didn't have the resources, or the interest, left to cover policy.
“A major difference between Trump and Clinton’s coverage was that she had a news category entirely of her own—the emails that she sent and received as secretary of state,” noted Harvard professor of government and the press Tom Patterson. As he wrote, the vast majority of Clinton email coverage was negative. In eight of the 10 weeks between July 11 and Sept. 18, 2016, “email” was the word most Americans associated with Clinton campaign coverage, according to Gallup.
NBC’s Nightly News spent 31 minutes on the emails that year, and just eight minutes on policy issues. CNN’s The Situation Room seemed especially obsessed: Clinton emails represented 17% of the program’s Clinton coverage during the four-week summertime span. Note that during the political conventions in the summer of 2016, the press spent 8% of its time covering Clinton emails and half that amount of time covering all of Clinton’s policy positions.
These numbers represent a staggering retreat from issues-orientated campaign coverage of the past. In 2008, the last time both parties nominated new candidates for the White House, the network newscasts devoted 220 minutes to issues coverage, compared to only 32 minutes in 2016. (CBS Evening News went from 119 minutes of issues coverage in 2008 to a microscopic 16 minutes in 2016.)
And it wasn't just television news that walked away from policy. "In just six days," according to an analysis of 2016 coverage published in the Columbia Journalism Review, “the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election." Additionally, “Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton” during the last 69 days of the 2016 cycle, "291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidate’s positions."
Meanwhile, research by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society "found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal.”
And who benefited from the near-blackout of policy on the part of the press? Trump, of course, since his campaign did very little to outline the candidate’s core beliefs. Clinton, by contrast, did the opposite. As the Associated Press reported at the time, “Trump’s campaign has posted just seven policy proposals on his website, totaling just over 9,000 words. There are 38 on Clinton’s ‘issues’ page, ranging from efforts to cure Alzheimer’s disease to Wall Street and criminal justice reform, and her campaign boasts that it has now released 65 policy fact sheets, totaling 112,735 words.”
The lack of policy specifics from Trump will likely only be more pronounced during the 2020 campaign season, while he faces off against a cadre of would-be Democratic opponents who are drowning in policy details. The press needs to stop punishing Democrats for doing the hard work.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.