Thread by @MattGertz

STUDY: NY Times, Wash. Post coverage of caravan plummets after midterms

News stories referencing the caravan have dropped by more than half post-elections, front-page ones by more than two-thirds

mediamatters.org/blog/2018/11/1…

In the eight days before the election, the Times and Post ran a total of 84 news stories in their print editions mentioning the caravan, putting 25 on the front page. In the eight days since, they ran 39 such stories, only eight of which ran on A1.

Look at those post-election declines in caravan coverage.

As I noted in a pre-election study, a lot of these articles are laudable on their own merits -- they told the migrants' stories, debunked presidential lies and conspiracy theories, and highlighted facts that undermined Trump’s demagoguery.

But taken together, their sheer volume couldn’t help but to fuel his fearmongering and make it impossible for other important pre-midterm stories to break through.

Post-election, the Post and Times are still producing valuable caravan reporting. But with the elections over and in the absence of regular comments from the president, they are publishing much less of it, and they’re giving the stories they do publish less prominent placement.

Newspaper resources, column inches, and front-page real estate are all limited -- the amount of each that a paper devotes to particular stories reveals its editors’ priorities and signals to the public which issues are important.

The Times and Post appear to have given the caravan outsized coverage when Trump was fixated on it, and now that he isn’t, the papers are providing the issue with substantially less attention.

The data supports the Trump-as-assignment-editor theory.

The president is a notorious liar and conspiracy theorist. If media decision-allow him this level of control over the newshole, they will ignore critical issues in favor of covering what the president wants to talk about. That's a big, ongoing problem. #fin