He’s only been in the US for a few days, but the Pope has already accomplished what 16 GOP presidential candidates haven’t been able to for months: getting more network coverage than Donald Trump.
During the first three days Pope Francis was in the U.S., the morning and evening news broadcasts on ABC, CBS and NBC spent eight times the amount of coverage on the Pope than they did on presidential hopeful Donald Trump.
From the network evening news shows on September 22 (the day before Pope Francis landed in Washington D.C.) until the morning shows on September 25, the MRC found that the Big Three spent 285 minutes on Pope Francis’s visit to Washington D.C. and New York City, and only 35 minutes on Trump’s campaign. The news broadcasts from the evening before the Pope’s arrival were included because the networks devoted 22 minutes to preparations that American cities were making for the his arrival.
This is a departure for the broadcast networks, which spent 72 percent of all GOP campaign coverage between August 7 and 20 (the two weeks after to the first GOP debate) on Trump. Even though he got virtually no TV news attention until he officially declared on June 16, by the end of July Trump had already gotten more coverage than any of the other 16 GOP candidates had in all of 2015.
— Mike Ciandella is Research Analyst at the Media Research Center. Follow Mike Ciandella on Twitter. [1]