Tell The News Media: Stop Obsessing Over Donald Trump

The news media is completely obsessed with Donald Trump. This obsession is hurting our democracy and is rewarding Trump for extremism and bigotry. ABC, NBC, CBS and all the cable news channels are guilty of this.

Consider the following...

1) Network news has covered Donald Trump more than the entire Democratic field combined. Notably, ABC World News devoted 81 minutes of coverage to Donald Trump. By contrast, they have only given about 20 seconds of coverage to Bernie Sanders over the entire year.

2) So far this year, Donald Trump has accounted for 27% of all campaign coverage on the nightly news programs.

3) CNN has mentioned Donald Trump more than the rest of the Republican field combined and about 1.5x more than the Democratic field combined.

4) MSNBC has mentioned Donald Trump 56,748 times. By contrast, MSNBC has mentioned the entire Democratic field combined 34,807 times.

5) Fox News has had Donald Trump on air 1,366 minutes since the beginning of his announcement. That's nearly 2.5 times more airtime than the candidate with the next most airtime.

6) Even worse, the news media goes out of their way to give Trump special privileges. They let him call in to shows at significantly higher rates than other candidates. This matters a lot because it enables Trump's consumption of airtime by allowing him to appear on multiple shows by phone without concern for scheduling conflicts and logistics. Not to mention, the constant breaking in to cover the same old stump speech that Trump has been giving for months.

And those are just a few examples that illustrate how out of control this has gotten. This hurts our democracy by crowding out coverage of other important issues and other candidates. And all it really does is reward Donald Trump's extremism and bigotry.

Enough is enough. It's time for the news media to stop their obsession with Trump.