Tonight on CNN’s massively-hyped Republican presidential debate, Donald Trump will finally have to share the cameras with the other candidates.
According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of cable news coverage since Trump announced his campaign, CNN has aired 2,159 stories about the Republican frontrunner:
That is almost double the amount of time CNN has spent on former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was leading the field prior to Mr. Trump’s rise. Mr. Bush has been mentioned in 1,087 stories during the same time. Next up is Ted Cruz with 416 mentions. No other candidates managed to crack 400 mentions on the Time Warner Inc.-owned news channel.
Advertisement
The analysis, completed by San Francisco-based Zignal Labs, found “outsized” coverage of Trump by Fox News and MSNBC, but not to the same extent as CNN. “The effect of the Trump coverage has been to rob this utterly fascinating, very broad and qualified field of candidates of the serious attention they deserve,” former CNN Washington bureau chief Frank Sesno told the WSJ.