A Harvard professor studied 10 major media outlets and found a harsh reality about election coverage

10 major outlets studied

Each report was based on a detailed content analysis of the presidential election coverage on five television networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC) and in five leading newspapers (Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today).

The analysis indicates that substantive policy issues have received only a small amount of attention in the 2016 election coverage.

But in the overall context of election coverage, issues have played second fiddle. They were at the forefront in the halls of the national conventions but not in the forefront of convention-period news coverage. Not a single policy proposal accounted for even 1% of Hillary Clinton's convention-period coverage, and collectively her policy stances accounted for a mere 4% of it.

Trump's policies got more attention — but not until after the Democratic convention ...

"Medialities" is the label political scientist Michael Robinson has given to such controversies. Journalists find them irresistible,

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What distracts us

The leading "mediality" of the 2016 campaign has been Clinton's emails. That and other news references to Clinton-related "scandals" accounted for 11% of her convention-period coverage.

Policy issues, on the other hand, lack novelty.