As Republican Presidential candidates gather to debate each other in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, there’s going to be a surprise winner: The media.
Though people claim to hate it… and many scholars dismiss its powers of persuasion… the media has a huge level of influence over our elections. And I’ve got some pretty good evidence to back this up.
You can’t get on stage in Wisconsin without getting enough poll support. In fact, these harsh polling rules kept many from entering the race in the first place, according to Walt Hickey with Business Insider, and will deny others a chance to appear in front of the voters for some badly-needed exposure, especially with professional media attention-grabber Trump skipping it
This summer, I researched how often candidates are covered in media stories published on the Internet. I found Donald Trump got 256 times as many Google hits as Asa Hutchison. This could help explain why Donald Trump averaged about 53% support in surveys this summer, while Hutchison couldn’t manage even 1% in the polls, even though people liked him at the Georgia convention.
It’s not just Google. Bing’s search engine generates 1 hit for Hutchison for every 142 for Trump. Trump has 36 million stories on Bing, and Hutchison is managing only 252,000 on the same search engine.
It’s not as if Asa Hutchison is a nobody. He’s a former Congressman, Homeland Security Director, and Arkansas Governor. I would personally like to know some of Hutchison’s solutions to our nation’s problems. I suspect he just might take a different approach to Russia and China, as well as some good policy ideas dealing with inflation and immigration, ones that voters might want to know. But we’ll probably never know them.
And former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who also served in the state legislature and as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has a lot to be jealous of Asa Hutchison’s hits. I found only 91,000 hits for Haley on Bing. Trump receives 395 times more coverage than she gets.
I gathered data on Google hits for ten presidential candidates, and calculated the percentage of their sum of total hits. I then compared it to their average RealClearPolitics poll percentage from mid-June to mid-July. You’d be stunned by the results. Trump had 49% percent of all of the combined hits for all ten presidential candidates, and 53% in the polls. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had 19% percent of all hits, and 21% percent of the votes in the poll average. Sense a pattern?
Most of the rest of the candidates have less than 5% of the hits, and a similarly tiny standing in the polls. The correlation measure between hits and polls was a stunning .9561.
We used to have something called the Fairness Doctrine, where the media was supposed to give relatively equal coverage to all candidates, so the American people could decide. It was developed and enforced by the Federal Communications Council starting in 1949. It was backed by Congress in 1954, and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1969 in the Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC case. But it was Ronald Reagan’s FCC chairman who opposed it in the 1980s, claiming “the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.”
Two years later, in 1987, the FCC panel repealed the Fairness Doctrine. An outraged U.S. Senate voted against the FCC rule, but President Reagan vetoed it. (This isn’t an anti-Reagan rant: This information comes from the Reagan Library.)
Several GOP candidates will stand on the stage, and compete for the interest of the American people this week. But their presence there, and the absence of others, is hardly an accident. Unless you get a lot of attention from the media — new and traditional — you don’t stand a chance. And the voters won’t have any more say in this than the candidates. That is the case… unless we restore the Fairness Doctrine, as Chris Lehmann, editor of the New Republic, has called for.
John A. Tures is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Political Science Program at LaGrange College, in LaGrange, Georgia.