As of Nov. 30, 2015 those were the 3 major networks’ numbers, according to this “Washington Post” article WaPo:
According to the Tyndall Report, which tracks the airtime that the various flagship news programs on NBC, CBS and ABC dedicate to a variety of stories, the 2016 election has received 857 minutes of combined coverage, through Nov. 30. With a month to go, that’s already the second biggest total of any pre-election year in the last seven presidential cycles.
As it breaks down, even Joseph Biden, who was never even a candidate, received more than 5x as much airtime as Bernie Sanders:
The report found, for instance, that the Republican primary race has received more than twice as much coverage as the Democratic contest. “Besides the fact that there are many more Republican candidates than Democratic ones, the GOP debates have made much more news than the Democrats’ [debates],” Tyndall noted.
Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, is the most-covered candidate in the race. In fact, he alone has gotten more airtime (234 minutes) than the entire Democratic field (226 minutes).
That sounds about right for the media as a whole, doesn’t it?
Democratic favorite Hillary Clinton is the second-most-covered candidate, at 113 minutes.
Two other things stand out: First, Vice President Joe Biden, who flirted with a run but ultimately stayed out of the Democratic race, got far more coverage (56 minutes) than Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (10 minutes), who actually is running and polled well for much of the summer and fall.
In summary:
We can debate the extent to which the nightly network newscasts matter all that much anymore. Total viewership has been cut in half since 1980 (52.1 million to 25.7 million), according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Nielsen data. But if we think of the newscasts’ coverage distribution as a proxy for what much of the mainstream media does, Tyndall’s numbers are more interesting.
“Interesting” doesn’t begin to do it for me...