Amid all the reports about fake news infiltrating our world in 2016 and stealing the election comes a damning piece in the Columbia Journalism Review detailing the damage real journalists did last year.
Frankly, it's as jaw-dropping as it is unsurprising given the media's obsession with Hillary Clinton's email “scandal” while Donald Trump largely slid by as an unconventional boob reporters just couldn't get enough of.
But the numbers provide an even more forceful indictment of election coverage in retrospect, especially as we watch our republic unravel at the hands of a mad man who had zero public service experience, zero respect for the foundational principles of our democracy, no interest in the art of governance or diplomacy, and no coherent platform other than rank nativism.
First, a research team divided all the campaign stories written in mainstream outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Huffington Post, and Politico into scandal and policy-related stories. Here’s what they found:
1. Clinton's email scandal and campaign hacks got 20,000 more sentences than all Trump's scandals (bankruptcy, Trump U., Trump Foundation, Gold Star bullying, sexual assault, race-baiting nativist statements, etc.)
They 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. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions. (emphasis added)
Then the Columbia Journalism Review dug further into NYT coverage specifically and broke the stories into several categories: personal scandal, policy, and miscellaneous.
Here’s what that looked like:
That “Miscellaneous” category that accounts for more than half the coverage included stories about the “horserace,” strategy, internecine warfare, etc. And then see that teensy weensy sliver of teal up top—that minuscule slice represents how much coverage the Times devoted to the policy positions of the guy currently sitting in the Oval Office sticking pins into his American checks-and-balances voodoo doll.
2. Only 10 percent of 150 front-page articles in the print edition covered actual policy (as opposed to scandal, the horse race, or miscellaneous campaign issues)
… just over 10 percent (16) of articles discussed Policy, of which six had no details, four provided details on Trump’s policy only, one on Clinton’s policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates’ policies.
In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail. (emphasis added)
3. Clinton email stories got as much coverage in one week as policy stories did during the final two months of the campaign
In just six days, 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 (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election.
Bottom line: Based on volume and clicks, mainstream news media got far more eyeballs than any fake news story or Russian hacker did and the “journalism” featured in those outlets did Americans a much greater disservice.