Studies agree: Media gorged on Hillary Clinton email coverage / Washington Post

A December report from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy delivered some sobering news for all those investigative reporters who may have supposed that their Trump exclusives were changing the world: None of them were breaking from the pack. “Clinton’s controversies got more attention than Trump’s (19 percent versus 15 percent) and were more focused,” noted study author Thomas E. Patterson. “Trump wallowed in a cascade of separate controversies. Clinton’s badgering had a laser-like focus. She was alleged to be scandal-prone. Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage—four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position.”

Another study-producing instrumentality of Harvard University couldn’t agree more. In a report released last week, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard put together this chart documenting coverage of various Clinton-Trump issues from May 2015 through the November 2016 election.





“Clinton – Email” is clearly the beast of this lot, though the category includes not only the scandal over the candidate’s use of a personal email server during her run as secretary of state, but also emails that surfaced on WikiLeaks relating to her campaign. Whereas the Shorenstein Center conclusions featured inputs from the major broadcasters and newspapers over the final months of the 2016 race, the Berkman Klein results stem from online content over a longer period. That they both reached the same conclusion says something. “I think the fact that we get the same results as Shorenstein using significantly different methodologies yields a high degree of confidence,” Robert Faris, the center’s research director, tells the Erik Wemple Blog.

So just how did this disparity evolve? “One of the possible explanations of this is that these scandals associated with Hillary Clinton spanned the entirety of the whole campaign. The Trump scandals came and went over time,” says Faris. Of course, scandals don’t behave entirely of their own accord; they need media attention or inattention to live another day or expire. As Faris himself notes, the Trump campaign and its allies — particularly in Congress — found ways to keep the email server in the news. The story, says Faris, “just kept getting updated repeatedly over time.” Take it from the Erik Wemple Blog, who has written millions of posts on topics like Fox News, “Fox & Friends” and Rolling Stone’s disastrous rape story: Updating a story whose facts and outlines are already familiar is a great deal easier than starting a fresh topic.

more... https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/08/25/studies-agree-media-gorged-on-hillary-clinton-email-coverage/?utm_term=.f3ebe5b5c727


Edit: Reminder form 2016.


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