On December 3rd, 2020, Alex Shephard wrote a story for the New Republic titled, "The Media is Finally Tuning Trump Out."¹

I'm not so sure that's true, but if it is, it has been a long time coming.

This plot shows the percentage of headlines from Fox News and CNN from September 2015 until December 2020 that contain the word 'trump'.

For example, during the week of Sep. 10, 2015, the farthest-left blue dot, CNN mentioned Trump 37 times in 222 headlines: 16.7% of the time.

On many occasions, Trump was mentioned in more than 50% of all the headlines in a week. Donald Trump (plus Ivanka, Don Jr., Eric, and the rest of the crew) dominated news coverage over the last five years.

While it is clear that CNN and Fox News talk about Trump very frequently, there is a lot of noise in this data. Changing the y-axis from raw data to a four-week rolling average makes trends a little easier to see.

Notice how as an election nears in both 2016 and 2020, both networks mention Trump more frequently. And despite occasional flareups, there does seem to be some Trump fatigue slowly coming on from the beginning of 2017 until early 2020 until coverage picks up again for the election.

But remember: in a typical week about 1 out of every 3 or 4 headlines was about Trump. Fox News and CNN might have lost a bit of the fire throughout Trump's term as President, but they never really got tired of talking about him.

And in terms of stories, it's hard to see a slowdown.

While the percentage of CNN headlines mentioning Trump might seem somewhat consistent or even slightly decreasing, the total number of headlines mentioning Trump has stayed high. Really high.

As a result, CNN is pumping out just as many Trump stories as ever. From August to December 2020, CNN averaged over 296 Trump stories per week.

For Fox News, it's a similar story. The smaller sample size makes it more difficult to decipher the trend, but the number of Trump headlines over the last few months is mostly consistent with previous years.

In total since September 2015, CNN has mentioned Trump in a headline 38,702 times, and Fox News has mentioned Trump 1,692 times.

It is important to note that the sample sizes for the networks are vastly different in size.

All of this data was scraped from the networks' respective sites, and the number of stories I found isn't consistent across network or time period. Using Python scripts, I was able to scrape 186,966 headlines from 38 shows on CNN's website. From Fox News, I was able to access 5,957 headlines from 14 shows.

The media may or may not finally be tuning Trump out like Alex Shephard said, but either way, one thing is clear: for the last five years, the media has spent far too much time focusing on Trump — at the expense of other important issues.

According to 2019 Nielsen ratings, CNN averaged around 972,000 viewers for its prime time programming.² However, in November 2020, with Americans trapped at home due to the coronavirus and eyes glued to never-ending election coverage, CNN's total average primetime viewership jumped to 1.78 million.³

When a million plus people tune into CNN, what do they see?

Notice how almost all of the top words are related to politics: Biden, Clinton, Obama, Trump, white, house, impeachment, election, campaign...

Hover your cursor over a bar to see a random selection of CNN headlines containing the word. Click 0 to reset the rankings to the top 10.

The top words for Fox News are similar, though there are a few words that rank highly for one network but not for the other.

For example, #19 for Fox News is 'left.' Fox News programs often refer to 'the left' as a sort of liberal monolith, and use terms like 'leftists' and 'the radical left' much more often than CNN. The Fox News leaderboard also includes [Lindsey] 'graham', [Nancy] 'pelosi', and [James] 'comey', none of which appear in the top 50 words for CNN.

Coincidentally, #10 for both CNN and Fox News is 'impeachment'— though there is typically a stark difference in sentiment between a CNN 'impeachment' headline and a Fox News 'impeachment' headline...

One network ran a story titled: 'the Impeachment Circus'. The other wrote about 'White House in Crisis: The Impeachment Inquiry.' I'll let you guess who's who.

Ironically (though perhaps not surprising), #4 for Fox News is 'media.' The majority of Fox News headlines about 'the media' have a sprinkling of negative sentiment, especially when the headline is about coverage that is opposite the Fox News narrative.

All this coming from the network that, in 2019, had seven of the top ten highest-rated cable news programs². The media is you, Fox News.

Our world is complex, constantly changing, and, in many ways, confusing. Events of massive consequence are happening every day — an obesity epidemic in parallel with hundreds of millions of people without food security; rising temperatures and sea levels squeezing our planet's most vulnerable populations; our elected representatives selling out to the highest bidder; worsening economic and social equality; surveillance capitalism; the list truly goes on and on.

No one person can take in all of the world's information on their own. We must rely on and trust entities larger than ourselves to sift through the flood of information and decide which we should pay attention to.

CNN and Fox News both claim to fill that role for millions of Americans, but by remaining fixated on politics and partisanship, both networks fail to inform their viewers of the real issues facing the world.

Instead, they spin their viewers into a never ending blame game and keep them fixated on the gossip of the day, all the while avoiding the root causes of their discontentment.

From the perspective of the media corporations, this game plan makes sense. Information simply does not attract as many viewers as sensationalism or a never ending stream of 'breaking news' updates about Trump's twitter feed. But for viewers, this content is nothing but a distraction.

If we are to understand and address the many challenges we face, we must demand better from the corporations that claim to inform us – or abandon them altogether.