Rieder: Trump coverage out of control
OK, this is now officially out of control.
Donald Trump's dominance of media coverage of the Republican presidential primary has jumped all of those sharks that have shown up off the North Carolina coast. All of them.
Consider:
-- A new CNN survey shows that between Aug. 7 and 21, the two weeks after the kickoff GOP debate, the nightly network news shows gave The Donald nearly twice as much coverage as all 16 other candidates combined.
--CNN also reported that Trump was mentioned 318 times on NYTimes.com between Aug. 7 and 22. That's 138 more mentions than the next-highest candidate, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and three times as many as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker received.
--Last Friday, The Washington Postop-ed page contained four columns. Yep, each and every one of them was about Trump.
--Worst of all, there's even talk that Trump will be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone, sacred terrain better suited to aging boomer rock gods.
Don't get me wrong. It's clear that so far Donald Trump is the story of the GOP campaign. There's no question he deserves big coverage. His continuing stranglehold on the polls despite a series of gaffes that would doom most other candidates is astounding. Whether you like him or not, the bombastic billionaire is not only ahead in those polls, he is shaping the race as his lagging rivals embrace some of his out-there positions.
Treating him as a marginal figure, as The Huffington Post has done by relegating him to the Entertainment section, makes no sense at all. It's not only elitist, it gives readers a distorted sense of what is happening in the race.
But there needs to be some sense of proportion. Those network news stats are truly troubling, as is that all-Trump Post op-ed page. And Trump has had an outsize presence on cable and in print as well.
The GOP field contains a remarkable number of experienced candidates with actual political pedigrees. They deserve to get some exposure as well.
The cliche is that Trump is sucking up all of the oxygen in the race. But New York magazine columnist Frank Rich puts a different spin on this notion. "He is the one who's made this race interesting," Rich said Sunday on CNN's Reliable Sources, adding, "my feeling is, he is the oxygen." No doubt Trump's presence was a key reason that the first GOP debate on Fox News Channel attracted 24 million viewers, the most ever to watch a primary debate and the largest audience for anything ever on cable outside of sports.
It's no mystery why Trump is getting all this exposure. He's great copy. He's great television. Aside from being a mogul, he's an entertainer, and he knows how to push all the right media buttons. His outrageousness, his refusal to back away from his awful comments, his love of wallowing in political incorrectness, are audience catnip. He's clickbait. Even many who can't stand him will check out his latest atrocity, just to stay on top of the national conversation. He's the classic car wreck; you can't avert your eyes.
But let's tone it down a little, please.
The network news numbers compiled by CNN are truly eye-opening. Trump racked up 36 minutes and 30 seconds on the nightly news on ABC, CBS and NBC. That's nearly four times as much as Bush, who received 9 minutes and 22 seconds. Far behind were Ohio Gov. John Kasich (2 minutes 29 seconds), Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (1 minute 35 seconds) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (1 minute 16 seconds).
But their numbers were an eternity compared with the exposure of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (3 seconds each) and South Carolina Sen.Lindsey Graham, (1, count it 1, second).
ABC's World News Tonight was the Trumpnado leader with more than 15-and-a-half minutes spent on The Donald, nearly twice the amount of Trump coverage on the CBS Evening News, with NBC Nightly News in the middle.
Monday showed Trump once again at his media-hogging best, quickly exploiting the stock market unpleasantness by taking to Twitter to blast China, getting plenty of attention from many news outlets including USA TODAY.
Trump will be with us for a while, and covering him will remain part of the deal. But let's try to remember that there are quite a few other candidates out there, and giving them some attention is part of the deal as well.