Walking away from a long-standing tradition of covering issues and presidential policies during campaign season, the network evening newscasts have all but abandoned that type of reporting this year, according to recent tabulations from Tyndall Report, which for decades has tracked the flagship nightly news programs.

Since the beginning of 2016, ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News have devoted just 32 minutes to issues coverage, according to Andrew Tyndall.

Differentiating issues coverage from daily campaign coverage where policy topics might be addressed, Tyndall defines issues coverage by a newscast this way: “It takes a public policy, outlines the societal problem that needs to be addressed, describes the candidates' platform positions and proposed solutions, and evaluates their efficacy.”

And here’s how that kind of in-depth coverage breaks down, year to date, by network:

ABC: 8 minutes, all of which covered terrorism.

NBC: 8 minutes for terrorism, LBGT issues, and foreign policy.

CBS: 16 minutes for foreign policy, terrorism, immigration, policing, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

And this remarkable finding from Tyndall [emphasis added]:

No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates' terms, not on the networks' initiative.

These numbers are staggering in terms of the complete retreat they represent from issues-orientated campaign coverage. Just eight years ago, the last time both parties nominated new candidates for the White House, the network newscasts devoted 220 minutes to issues coverage, compared to only 32 minutes so far this year. (CBS Evening News went from 119 minutes of issues coverage in 2008 to 16 this year.)

Note that during the Republican primary season alone, the networks spent 333 minutes focusing on Donald Trump. Yet for all of 2016, they have set aside just one-tenth of that for issue reporting.

And look at this: Combined, the three network newscasts have slotted 100 minutes so far this year for reporting on Hillary Clinton’s emails while she served as secretary of state, but just 32 minutes for all issues coverage. (NBC’s Nightly News has spent 31 minutes on the emails this year; just eight minutes on issues.)

Indeed, this approach used to be a hallmark of presidential campaign reporting; outline what candidates stand for, describe what their presidency might look like, and compare and contrast that platform with his or her opponents. i.e. What would the new president’s top priorities be on the first day of his or her new administration?

It seems clear that the media’s abandonment of issues coverage benefits Trump since his campaign has done very little to outline the candidate’s core beliefs. Clinton, by contrast, has done the opposite.

As the Associated Press reported, “Trump’s campaign has posted just seven policy proposals on his website, totaling just over 9,000 words. There are 38 on Clinton’s ‘issues’ page, ranging from efforts to cure Alzheimer’s disease to Wall Street and criminal justice reform, and her campaign boasts that it has now released 65 policy fact sheets, totaling 112,735 words.”

Tyndall’s findings echo what other media researchers have found this campaign season, and what commentators have been noting for months

A study released last month from Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy confirmed that during the time of both parties’ conventions this summer, just eight percent of news coverage centered on policy and issues.

“During the convention period, even though questions of policy and leadership were on the agenda within the halls of the national conventions, they were not on journalists’ agenda,” wrote Harvard University professor Thomas Patterson. “Polls, projections, strategy and the like constituted about a fifth of all coverage, whereas issues took up less than 1/12 and the candidates’ qualifications for the presidency accounted for less than 1/13.”

Part of the purpose of campaign coverage, including at the flagship network newscasts, is to help inform voters about key issues of public concern. It’s troubling that the networks have decided this year to walk away from that responsibility

Trump did not specify which polls he believed to be fake, nor did he offer any further clarity on which Democrats or Democratic institutions were concocting the “phony” polls. Widely respected and accepted polls have shown Trump trailing badly in recent days, including some that put Democrat Hillary Clinton up by double-digits. The former secretary of state holds a 5.8 percentage point lead in the Real Clear Politics polling average, 45 percent to 39.2 percent.

The allegation appeared to be a fresh approach to a common campaign-trail theme for Trump in recent days, that the presidential election will be rigged against him. Trump has suggested, without evidence, that voter fraud could hand the election to Clinton and has refused to guarantee that he will accept the results on Election Night.

Trump has also suggested that negative media reports about him, especially those concerning allegations of sexual assault, are also evidence of a rigged election. Trump has regularly said that negative reports about him are the result of a vast conspiracy involving the media and Clinton’s campaign.

Speaking at the presidential debate Wednesday night, Clinton noted that it takes four minutes from the time the president makes the call to use nuclear weapons to their actual launch. The remark came amid questions about the fitness of Clinton and GOP candidate Donald Trump to hold the nation’s nuclear codes, but critics, including former intelligence operatives, told Fox News that level of detail about nuclear response times is “protected information.”

Launch-ready nuclear forces are linked to the U.S. and Russian Presidents by their respective nuclear command and control systems, which include ground and space-based Early Warning Systems that detect a hostile missile attack. Any tactical warning is quickly evaluated, and once validated it is passed up the chain of command in a matter of a few minutes. These high-speed information networks are designed to provide each President the capability to order the launch of his nuclear forces before they can be destroyed by an incoming nuclear attack.

However, this is hardly a simple task, because the nominal flight time of a ballistic missile traveling between the U.S. and Russia is about 30 minutes; it is 12 minutes for a missile launched by a submarine stationed off the coast. These short flight times define and dictate how much “Presidential decision-making time” is available for the President to decide whether or not to launch a nuclear strike in response to the perceived attack.

The decision to either launch a responsive nuclear counter strike, or ride out the attack, must be made in less time than it takes for the (perceived) incoming ICBM/SLBM attack to arrive. Otherwise the incoming warheads will likely destroy most of the ground-based forces, along with the nuclear command and control system (and leadership) necessary to coordinate and launch a nuclear counterstrike – assuming the attack is real. A launch in response to a false warning will result in accidental nuclear war.

Thus the entire process of detecting and evaluating the attack warning must be completed in less than 7 minutes. According to retired military officers, the President is then given a 30 second briefing. If the attack warning is still believed to be real, the president is then given a series of options, all of which have been planned well in advance.

If the attack is believed to come from a submarine, the President will be told that he then has as little as 10 seconds to make the decision whether or not to launch a responsive nuclear attack. This is because the nuclear warheads delivered by a SLBM will arrive in slightly more than four more minutes. The order to launch must be immediately conveyed to launch crews sitting in underground bunkers, who control the missiles. The missiles must then be fired and clear the upper atmosphere before the incoming warheads began to detonate