Report: If You Want Media Attention, Pick A Fight

To see how much coverage each presidential candidate is getting, a media-monitoring firm headquartered in the U.K. has been tracking 10,000 print media, 1,500 broadcast outlets and more than 2.6 million online sources world-wide since January.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the goal is to offer insight into how media coverage of the candidates looks over time, according to Signal A.I., the company behind the project, but it also illuminates how the volume of coverage has focused the public’s attention.

“The media don’t tell us what to think,” said Stuart Soroka, a professor of communications studies and political science at the University of Michigan. “They tell us what to think about.”

If that’s the case, the tacit message about Mr. Gravel appears to be: Don’t bother.

So far, Joe Biden, who has received more attention than any other Democrat, has been mentioned in more than 648,000 media accounts.

One caution, according to Rodney Benson, chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, is that the tallies aggregate all media without regard to prestige, audience size or article prominence. “It may overemphasize small, minor outlets,” he said.

But for the most part, the tallies confirm what people who follow politics intuit:

Any time a major figure announces his or her candidacy, coverage of that person spikes and briefly dominates the news cycle. Titillating developments, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders’s tax returns revealing that he is part of the 1%, also grab attention, while policy announcements, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plan to cancel student debt and eliminate tuition, get relatively less notice.

Wall Street Journal graphic

However, there is an elephant in the room.

Altogether, the Democrats have been mentioned in 4.15 million articles and broadcasts world-wide since January, according to Signal A.I.’s tally, but President Trump has been mentioned in nearly 10.3 million media accounts.

“That’s useful to quantify,”  Danny Hayes, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University said. “It tells us something about media behavior and the kinds of incentives candidates have if they want to get more news coverage.”

The best way to get attention, he said, is to pick a fight.