{"id":9,"date":"2015-08-23T15:24:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-23T19:24:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/?p=9"},"modified":"2016-11-12T15:28:09","modified_gmt":"2016-11-12T20:28:09","slug":"trumping-bernie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/trumping-bernie\/","title":{"rendered":"Trumping Bernie"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>Although we are right to be concerned about the growth of campaign advertising<\/a>, especially when the candidates\u2019 resources are unequal, you could argue that the amount of free time (or space) given to candidates by the news media is more important. \u00a0Statements made by and about candidates in the free media are not as likely to be\u00a0discounted as advertisements. (The discounting principle<\/a><\/i> states that our confidence in a particular explanation of behavior is weakened by the presence of alternative explanations. In an advertisement, our knowledge that this is a paid message intended to persuade us makes us less likely to see the message as truthful.)\n

Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have both shown similar increases in support in the presidential polls. According to the\u00a0Real Clear Politics<\/a><\/i>\u00a0average of all polls, support for Sanders has grown from 12.7% to 25% from July 1 to the present, while Trump has gone from 6% to 22%. Sanders\u2019 progress might be considered more impressive, however, since he has received less free media coverage.<\/p>\n

$\"5440388253_7a8e8c1584_b-1\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) used the Nexus database<\/a> to count the number of free mentions of Sanders and Trump on 13 news media sources between July 1 and August 15. In all cases, Trump received more coverage. The chart below gives the percentage of stories mentioning Sanders as a percentage of those mentioning Trump. For example, on CNN, the ratio was 33%, meaning that Sanders was mentioned one-third as often, or that Trump received three times as much coverage.<\/p>\n

$\"TrumpSandersChart\"$ <\/a>On average, Sanders received 36% as much coverage as Trump. However, there were some interesting differences<\/a> among the 13 outlets.<\/p>\n

\n
On the three outlets with the largest audience, the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, Sanders was mentioned only 16% as often as Trump, or in other words, Trump received six times as much publicity.<\/li>\n
The country\u2019s five major newspapers averaged 34%, very close to the overall average.<\/li>\n
Public radio and television, which presumably have a mandate to be fair, scored only slightly above the overall average in Sanders coverage.<\/li>\n
MSNBC, sometimes described as a \u201cprogressive\u201d cable network, did have the highest percentage of Sanders coverage, but still mentioned Trump more often.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
As Bernie Sanders continues to draw large crowds<\/a>, the message of the news media seems to be that there\u2019s \u201cnothing to see here<\/a>.\u201d If we were to ask them why Trump receives so much more publicity than Sanders, my guess is they would claim that his flamboyant personal style makes his activities of greater public interest. However, I suspect that a more important cause is that a\u00a0central theme of Sanders\u2019 campaign is reducing economic inequality<\/a>, an unwelcome message to\u00a0those who own, advertise on, or perform on the news media.<\/p>\n
$\"19197893134_9616570321_n\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n
In addition to discounting campaign advertising, these data suggest we should also discount some of the coverage candidates receive in the free media. However, we\u2019re less likely to do that, since their conflicts of interest are less obvious.<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although we are right to be concerned about the growth of campaign advertising, especially when the candidates\u2019 resources are unequal, you could argue that the amount of free time (or space) given to candidates by the news media is more important. \u00a0Statements made by and about candidates in the free media are not as likely … Continue reading Trumping Bernie<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[83,57,5,4],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","tag-bernie-sanders","tag-donald-trump","tag-media-bias","tag-presidential-campaign"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6FkJj-9","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55,"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}