Dem
51
GOP
49
The Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford has decided to put A.I. to good use, and so developed the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, an interesting little toy that lets you figure out how much screen time various people get on the three major cable news outlets. For example, you can use it to learn that John F. Kennedy may be long dead, but he nonetheless got 5.4 minutes of face time across CNN, MSNBC and Fox last month. About 3.5 minutes of that was on CNN, about 1.7 was on Fox, and the meager remainder, about 20 seconds, was on MSNBC.
Axios decided to do a little testing of two Republicans and two Democrats connected to the 2024 presidential race, and how much attention they've gotten over the last year. The Republicans are obvious: Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). The network that gives far and away the most attention to Trump—more than the other two combined—is... MSNBC. You would be forgiven for guessing Fox, but they are actually a distant third, giving half as much face time to Trump (35 minutes/month right now) as CNN does (79 minutes/month), and only 25% as much as MSNBC (148 minutes/month). Even if Fox is not willing to come out strongly for some other candidate, clearly the Murdochs are doing what they can to deprive The Donald of oxygen.
The semi-vacuum on Fox is not working to the benefit of DeSantis, however. Of the four people who were examined, he got far and away the least attention—this despite the fact that one of the four isn't even running for president. DeSantis is checking in around 10 minutes per month per network. This has been pretty steady over the past year, although he appears to be trending downward at the moment. Not a promising sign for his presidential hopes.
One of the two Democrats is, of course, Joe Biden. Having read this far, you won't be surprised to learn that the network that gives him the most attention is Fox (77 minutes/month right now), with MSNBC in second place (42 minutes/month) and CNN in third (31 minutes/month). Yep, the sitting president gets around 150 minutes/month, whereas his predecessor gets nearly that much from MSNBC alone. Guess it pays to be indicted. Four times.
The other Democrat is... Hunter Biden. Here, Fox takes the lead, of course (38 minutes/month right now), followed by CNN (24 minutes/month) and MSNBC (21 minutes/month). That's right, Fox is actually giving more attention right now to Hunter Biden than it is to Donald Trump. And every outlet is giving the First Son somewhere between two and four times as much face time as DeSantis. Clearly, the Governor needs to find a computer repair shop in Berkeley and to leave his laptop there pronto.
Everyone already knows that: (1) scandal sells, and (2) there's better ratings in negative coverage of the "bad guys" than there is positive coverage of the "good guys" (whoever the bad and good guys might be). But it's nice to have the data to confirm it. (Z)