SWAG-Man: Why the Media Gives It All Away to Donald Trump
He’s here… he’s there… he’s everywhere. He’s the Donald, Mr. Trump and the controversial, Republican frontrunner all wrapped into one. And the media just can’t seem to get enough.
A former contestant on “The Apprentice” and current professor at Howard University, Omarosa Manigault describes the media’s coverage of Trump’s campaign, “At first they were covering him thinking that it wouldn’t last just waiting to see when the train crash was going to happen. But now they can’t turn away because they want to see if he’ll go all the way.”
According to mediaQuant, a firm that tracks media coverage of each candidate, reported in March alone Mr. Trump earned well over 400 million dollars’ worth of free “earned media” which includes print, broadcast and social media websites. To put that number in perspective, it was more than double what his nearest competitor Senator Ted Cruz earned in that same period and more than Senator John McCain spent on his entire Presidential campaign in 2008.
Providing more context to the number, Chief Analytics Officer and Co-Founder at mediaQuant, Paul Senatori, says, “That is quite an anomaly… It’s actually quite an anomaly across everything we track, including celebrities, athletes, brands, um political topics, trends and global influencers. It’s hard to find another topic in the media that is within even 50 percent of that 400 million dollar number.”
According to mediaQuant, if you add up all this free media coverage since Mr. Trump got in the Presidential race last July, it’s almost 1.9 billion dollars -a staggering number on any level. Senatori explains, “To give you some other perspective, if you add in the top celebrities and you put in the top 50 NBA and NFL and soccer players, all their media value since last July when he came into the race they still don’t add up to 1.9 billion, so his level of coverage is almost off the scale at this point.”
As the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump is in it for the long haul. In fact, Omarosa believes that politics has never been so interesting, ”Donald Trump is seducing the American people. Never has politics been more interesting. And sexy and polarizing.”