Someone once told me that information can be completely true, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly complete. If you’ve ever wondered why certain stories are covered by US media while others are not, you know what my friend was hinting at. What the media covers and what it ignores matters. It influences which issues people consider important, and which candidates they consider credible.
Community stories aren’t driven by editorial decisions, but front-page stories are (many of them also get posted to Facebook). So I took a look at how the Daily Kos Front-Page covered major 2020 candidates. My sample size is 1200 stories published between March 29 and May 8. This period covers about six weeks. I analyzed the 1200 headlines to gauge how much coverage candidates were receiving.
2020 Candidate |
HEADLINES |
Vote in last DK straw Poll |
Donald Trump |
375 |
N/A |
Elizabeth Warren |
15 |
19% |
Joe Biden |
12 |
18% |
Kamala Harris |
6 |
8% |
Bernie Sanders |
5 |
34% |
Pete Buttigieg |
3 |
10% |
Jay Inslee |
3 |
2% |
Beto O’Rourke |
2 |
2% |
eric swalwell |
2 |
N/A |
julian castro |
2 |
N/A |
Amy Klobuchar |
0 |
1% |
What you’ll notice immediately is that Donald Trump gets the most coverage on DK’s front page. One of every three stories on the front page had Trump in the title. That’s an average of over 9 stories a day over this period.
The 375 references of Trump in DK front-page headlines vastly outpaces every other candidate. In fact, all the 2020 Democratic contenders combined merited only 52 DK headlines. Trump received 7.5 times as much coverage in DK headlines as did the entire 2020 Democratic field.
I’m sure part of this is click-driven. Trump is always up to no good, and nothing gets reads blood boiling like stories about his perfidy. Many of us are stuck in a cycle alternating between despair and rage. We feel compelled to read and share news of this disastrous administration. We’ve all been in this place.
However, for a site ostensibly focused on activism, it’s worth asking whether this is a good use of community time and attention. Yes, we need to know what new monstrous thing the Trump administration has done. But does it need to be 10 times a day and cover at least a third of the headlines?
2020 Democratic candidates are on the campaign trail trying to get noticed, releasing platforms and doing rallies. But they rarely get DK front-page coverage (which means no Facebook/social media coverage either). Warren had the most stories written about her, and that was one every three days. Other candidates merited even less attention.
Harris, Warren and Biden get more coverage than the other candidates. Their appearance in headlines is roughly commensurate with their relative popularity in DK’s straw poll. Makes sense, the straw poll is presumably a measure of the community’s interest in the candidate.
There’s an outlier to this logic though. It’s Bernie, who gets far less coverage on the DK front-page despite having been the front-runner in several consecutive straw polls. Presumably, the community is signaling an interest in Bernie by voting for him in the straw poll. That preference seems to have been ignored by whoever hands out front-page assignments, because Bernie had very few stories written about him. And that’s not because he’s sitting around doing nothing. For example, Bernie introduced major Medicare For All legislation in the Senate on April 10th, it was co-sponsored by a third of Democratic senators. No front-page story covered it. This was a great opportunity to highlight an important, visionary policy proposed by a major Democratic faction. The front-page had nothing. But we did have 11 stories that mentioned Trump, and another handful that mentioned Trump administration officials.
This anomaly is even more striking when you consider that two of the five headlines naming Bernie were about the DK straw poll or a scientific voter poll. All three were written by one front-pager and each tries to downplay Bernie’s popularity by suggesting his support is weakening or weaker than reported:
That leaves two positive stories about Bernie on the Front Page, one of which is a cartoon. Eric Swalwell got as much coverage (both were about his joining the race).
The only other Democratic candidate to have any negative stories written about them is Biden, who got flak on the front-page for various problematic positions. Three of the twelve stories about Biden is a knock of some sort against him.
In the run up to 2016, one of the things many of us noticed is that the media seemed enthralled by the spectacle that was the Trump campaign. They would provide wall to wall coverage of his rallies, while far larger events by other candidates went uncovered because those candidates didn’t say outrageous things that could serve as click-bait. Trump clearly believes there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I don’t know whether he’s right, but do we really want to test that proposition again in 2020?
— @subirgrewal