How the Democratic-leaning news media unintentionally supports Trump

What Donald Trump seems to understand better than anyone is the critical role that sheer brand recognition plays in voters' decisions. And almost no price is too high for him to get it. “There is no such thing as bad press unless you are a pedophile,” Trump is said to have once said to his advisers. This scandal-dependent, news-heavy strategy has made him extremely successful in using the news media to strengthen his brand.

Recognizing presidential candidates will be particularly important for the 5% of voters who are undecided and the 3% of voters who are wavering. After the 2016 US election, Regina Lawrence, in an analysis of the influence of the media on election results, argued that mere name recognition was the biggest driver of elections. When it comes to name recognition, Kamala Harris is in an extremely disadvantageous position, despite a recent media campaign aimed at increasing her name recognition among undecided voters. Given how systematically Trump is highlighted by the news media, it is difficult to increase his profile.

In 2010, five years before Trump entered politics, Byron Sharp shook the world of marketing with his groundbreaking book How brands grow. He challenged conventional wisdom by demonstrably showing that to attract new customers, brands need to increase their awareness among the widest possible group of people, rather than focusing on expanding and deepening their relationship with a core audience. In his presidential victory six years later, Trump provided a prime example of how this can be done. By creating constant controversy, he used the news media as a marketing tool to increase his profile – and continues to do so successfully today. In return for reporting on these mostly harrowing stories, the news media receives increased viewership and traffic.

The new findings from the AKAS US Election Media Tracker, based on GDELT's TV archive, show that his name has dominated the news since Trump's appearance on the election stage. In the last three presidential campaigns, Trump has been mentioned significantly more than other candidates on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. In 2016, his share of mentions averaged 61%, while Hillary Clinton reached 39% between July and October. During the same period in 2020, the percentage of Trump mentions averaged 59% compared to 41% for Joe Biden. In 2024, Harris' share of mentions in the current campaign averaged 43%, compared to Trump's 57%. Since August of this year, however, the proportion of Trump mentions on the Democratic-leaning channels CNN and MSNBC has risen surprisingly sharply. So much so that the latest results for the week beginning October 7th show a whopping 72% share of mentions for Trump on MSNBC and 61% on CNN.

When Trump is in the news, the public takes action. AKAS's analysis of Google search trends following online news reports that referenced Trump's name revealed an extraordinarily strong relationship between the two. Online coverage mentioning Trump is followed by a spike in Google searches for his name in the same week.

In a recent Rutgers University article, Prof. Lauren Feldman argued that news media can influence the outcome of an election in many ways, including through the disproportionate attention they devote to each candidate and specific policy issues. Donald Trump has a huge advantage over Kamala Harris, not only because she is relatively new to the political spotlight and does not have a scandal-based media strategy, but also because the news industry has been and remains obsessed with Donald Trump. So much so that it acts as a major news agenda setter.

For example, according to AKAS' US Election Media Tracker, Springfield was featured more often than business in online news coverage following the Trump/Harris TV debate, in which Trump falsely accused Springfield's Haitian immigrants of eating their neighbors' pets. Immigration or climate change for the following two crucial weeks in September.

To avoid focusing the amount of coverage on just one candidate, US news media can learn from the BBC, the United Kingdom's public broadcaster, which deliberately states in its guidelines for the 2024 general election that parties or Candidates must be covered “proportionately over an appropriate period of time” in its reporting.

The U.S. news media still has a few days to refocus and refine election coverage. Polls show that the public, particularly those who have not yet decided who to vote for, are most likely to engage with election coverage in the final weeks before Election Day. In 2020, the majority of the US public only paid “very much” attention to candidates’ campaigns in the final two weeks before the election.

Although the finish line is in sight, the news media still has an opportunity to give both presidential candidates a fair and proportionate voice and focus on the most important issues before Americans cast their ballots on November 5th.

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