The 2016 Candidates Who Are Making Headlines
Our interactive graphic offers a real-time snapshot of the race, using media attention to track the fortunes of the presidential hopefuls.
The election season has begun, and with it come regular mentions of presidential candidates on the television networks.
In an effort to visualize the number of media mentions each candidate receives, we put together a daily dashboard that tracks national television coverage of the 2016 presidential election, updated each morning. Using data from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive and processed by the GDELT Project, the visualization ranks the major presidential candidates from both parties by the number of times each is mentioned over the course of the day.
All shows on Aljazeera America, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Comedy Central, FOX Business, FOX News, LinkTV, and MSNBC are monitored (with the sole exception of Comedy Central, which only includes data from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, and At Midnight With Chris Hardwick because of their focus on current events). Also note that the counts are based on the raw closed captioning of each broadcast, so they may contain a margin of error due to the imperfect nature of closed captioning.
We invite you to explore the graphic and view a running picture of how the candidates are faring on television during the election season, or drill into the numbers by network using the explorer dashboard. Sort by the number of days to see how the trend and mentions change, along with the ranking of each candidate.