As Trump prepares to leave office, there are three points about media coverage that may have been obscured by the blizzard of headlines.
The first is that the volume of articles about the 45th president as he leaves office are at a record high.
As the chart above shows, this has been the biggest week for coverage of Trump ever. Bigger even than when he took office.
That never happens. U.S. presidents normally leave office with a whimper not a bang.
There were about 120,000 news articles citing Trump on some days last week, on the Bloomberg platform. That’s 20 percent more than were posted about the results of the election in November.
The second is that the volume of media coverage of Trump has been off the charts relative to other world leaders for the entire time he was in office.
Trump garnered about 30,000 stories a day. Obama during his final year in office would be closer to 5,000. Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron get a couple thousand.
The third point is how coverage of Trump dwarfed other major news events and remained elevated and steady during his entire presidency.
In the chart below I compare the volume of Trump coverage with that of Protests (mainly Black Lives Matter) and Brexit, which during any normal year would be considered a big event.
With the exception of a couple of days in June, Trump consistently gets far more media coverage.
The charts in this post leverage data from a new news archive of four billion articles carried on the Bloomberg terminal over the past decade.
The charts can be replicated on the Bloomberg professional system by running {NT <go>} and entering in search terms.
Ted Merz 