The Candidate Index

I’m sure they will feign innocence but how much time and space are our media sources devoting to all of the candidates running for president of the United States.

To refresh your memory, there are currently 3 major candidates still remaining. We aren’t counting Martin O’Malley.

The *three* major candidates are (in alphabetical order):

Hillary Clinton (D)

Bernie Sanders (D)

Donald Trump (R)

Sanders and Clinton? Who are they, you might ask? Indeed. What have they been doing in the last week? Judging by our nation’s sources of truth, we would have no idea. We wouldn’t know if they have any policy ideas, or struggles with campaign financing (seems inevitable with so much attention focused on the other guy), or anything really.

So, how are we going to show how much free publicity has been gifted to each candidate? I’m thinking I need a table of three rows for the candidates and multiple columns for media outlets’ front pages. Media outlets would be: NY Times, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC and Fox. I’ll count the number of times the candidate’s name shows up in a headline on the front page at 6am. Wait, does anyone have any insight on morning deadlines?

Also, what kind of metric should we be going for here?

Gotta go to work but I’ll be back later so if you have any ideas, put them in the comments.

For today, so far I see 3 headlines featuring Trump’s name, 0 featuring Clinton’s name, 0 featuring Sanders. 2 op/ed featuring Trump’s name (Krugman), 1 op/ed featuring Clinton’s name. Elsewhere on the front page of the NY Times, Trump’s name appears 6 times, Clinton’s appears 0, Sanders appears 0.

I can’t wait for Ezra Klein to tell me how surprised he was by this.