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Late in the night after the last presidential debate, J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, appeared on CNN to praise the performance of Donald Trump. Kaitlan Collins, the network host, wanted to know why Trump had repeated a false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of residents in the town of Springfield, Ohio—a claim that Vance had propelled into the national spotlight with a social media post the day before.
Vance seemed to concede that the veracity of the story was in doubt (“whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true, whatever the case may be…”), but he argued that his bigger goal was to get the press to focus on the topic of immigration overall: “I think it’s interesting, Kaitlan, that the media didn’t care about the carnage brought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats,” he said.
Vance’s argument—which drew more attention when he repeated it on the Sunday politics shows a few days later—was widely derided as cynical and defensive.
But CJR’s analysis of media coverage on the three big cable news networks—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—in the weeks since the debate shows that he may have nonetheless succeeded at drawing media attention to his campaign’s talking points.
Immediately after the debate, Google queries for “Haitians” spiked sharply, as did search prompts such as “eating pets,” “Haitians eating ducks video,” and even just the word “immigrants.”
Coverage of the subject of immigration surged on cable news, too—but while interest among searchers quickly dissipated, on cable the topic saw sustained engagement. In the first week of September, for example, the word “immigrants” was mentioned on average about forty-one times collectively each day; in the last week of September, it was mentioned on average some seventy-seven times a day.
In fact, while the debate between Trump and Kamala Harris was widely seen as a win for Harris, cable news coverage since then has largely trended in Trump’s favor, at least in terms of time allotment. Our analysis of closed-captioning data from the three cable networks shows that while Trump and Harris had roughly similar levels of engagement prior to their debate, Harris has consistently lagged in the weeks since.
That trend is even more apparent when looking at the vice presidential side of the ticket. Vance’s amplification of the pet-eating falsehoods coincided with the first time he was covered more on CNN than Tim Walz since Walz was announced as Harris’s running mate. In fact, to the extent Vance’s goal was to keep himself in the news, his approach has largely succeeded: he was consistently mentioned more on MSNBC, especially after his second interview with CNN, when he said he would continue to “create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.” (The coverage there is much more likely to be negative.)
Meanwhile, Walz’s main advantage came when he was announced as Harris’s running mate, but news interest in him has largely tapered off, and he has all but stopped doing interviews with national media. The vice presidential debate may offer Walz a chance to reintroduce himself—if he can overcome Vance’s knack for drawing the spotlight.
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