When news breaks, you need to understand what matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today? A stark finding from an analysis of New York Times coverage. The hand-wringing over the election continues more than a year later. Fake news. Russia collusion.
James Comey. But two researchers, David Rothschild and Duncan Watts, took on an in-depth analysis of the mainstream media that will add to the debate. It looked a little something like this:. It illuminates a larger problem in the coverage: The researchers found that the Times devoted much more online and print real estate to the campaign horse race and personal scandals for both candidates than it did to their policies on topics such as health care and taxes. Americans are dealing with the whiplash of that right now.
Watts and Rothschild compiled data for all front-page and online articles published by the Times between September 1, , and Election Day on November 8. They chose the publication because of its journalistic influence and reputation.
Basically, if the Times is messing up, then what the heck is everyone else doing? That overemphasis was noted long before Clinton lost the Electoral College. Cable news has been, if anything, worse, and many prestige outlets have joined the pileup. One malign result of obsessive email coverage is that the public is left totally unaware of the policy stakes in the election. Rothschild says the front-page or online headlines also matter because people rarely read through to the bottom of stories — even well-reported, thorough ones.
They did. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.
