Via Columbia Journalism Review

The Columbia Journalism Review takes an in-depth look at coverage of the 2016 presidential election in conventional mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and Politico. The takeaway: The mainstream media put much more of a spotlight on Hillary Clinton’s scandals — particularly related to her emails — than Donald Trump’s scandals, and devoted more attention to Trump’s policies than Clinton’s.

What did all these stories talk about? The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton’s emails, Trump’s taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.

CJR gives special attention to the New York Times, finding that the paper’s front page gave gave shockingly sparse attention to substantive policy in the final months leading up to Election Day, particularly in light of how much coverage was devoted to Clinton’s emails:

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When compared with the Times’s overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta).

Here’s the full report.