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In the month following Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race, Kamala Harris received a flurry of media attention.
But our analysis of closed-captioning data from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive indicates that since the Democratic National Convention wrapped up in Chicago last month, Donald Trump has once again been mentioned on the big three national cable news networks—CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News—more than his Democratic counterpart.
From the point President Biden announced that he would not be running to the end of the DNC, a period of one month, Harris was mentioned in about 8 percent more clips than Trump. In the two and a half weeks since, Trump has been mentioned in about 46 percent more clips than Harris.
While Harris’s bump might not seem like much, she was able to wrest a bigger share of cable news coverage from Trump than either Hillary Clinton or Biden was able to at this point in the previous two election cycles. Trump’s presence so dominated the airwaves in 2016 and 2020 that the number of times Clinton or Biden was mentioned on cable news rarely surpassed mentions of Trump.
While Trump dominating the airwaves again may seem like an unwelcome blast from the past for Democrats and a comeback story for Republicans, more attention from cable news may not necessarily be good for either candidate.
In fact, much of the attention that Harris has received has been from Fox News, which has been critical of her track record on border security, immigration, and the economy, and much of the coverage Trump has received this cycle has come from MSNBC, which has focused on issues like Project 2025 and the former president’s felony convictions.
A successful debate for Harris, at least in terms of media coverage, would be either to draw positive attention to herself—or to stay out of the way while Trump absorbs the kind of negative post-debate attention that sank Biden’s campaign.
The Internet TV News Archive chops closed-captioning data into fifteen-second clips, which we queried using GDELT’s API. If a candidate is mentioned more than once in a fifteen-second window, that is still counted as only one clip.
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