Bernie Sanders More Than Triples Hillary Clinton in Sunday Show Appearances

Independent Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his supporters would like voters to believe that they have been victims of “extreme bias” from the news media, a claim that all three candidates can make to some degree. In one key metric, however, Bernie Sanders blows away not just Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, but even presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

While it’s true that there are clear examples of bias against Sanders, as there are with Hillary Clinton and even against Donald Trump, the overall effect can be difficult to measure. There’s one metric, though, that clearly indicates how much of the most advantageous kind of coverage a candidate is getting, the kind of coverage in which the candidates get to speak for themselves directly to a national audience. On that score, Bernie Sanders is the hands-down winner, racking up more than triple the number of Sunday news show appearances of Hillary Clinton, and even eclipsing the total of media puppeteer Donald Trump.

Since the beginning of this campaign, Sanders has made 82 Sunday show appearances to Hillary Clinton’s 25, while Trump is close behind Sanders at 75, including this past weekend.

Even by other measures, though, it doesn’t appear that Sanders is getting short-shrift from the media. Analysis of “earned” versus paid media shows Hillary Clinton more than doubling Sanders (while Trump doubles the two of them put together), but another recent study shows that most of the free media Hillary earns has been negative. In blunt metrics like cable news mentions over the past three months, Clinton and Sanders split about a hundred thousand mentions 60-40, which roughly tracks with the vote totals they’ve received in the primaries. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is mentioned as much as Sanders and Clinton combined, despite earning millions fewer votes.

Over the past 30 days, according to LexisNexis, Hillary and Bernie have enjoyed very similar ratings in their “share of voice” metric, which measures candidates’ coverage across print, broadcast, web news and social media content. Their chart, though, is as vivid an illustration as I’ve seen of what this campaign has looked like from a media standpoint:

So far, Donald Trump has been swallowing them whole, with room to spare.

Bernie Sanders can continue to claim he hasn’t gotten a fair shake, but neither has Hillary Clinton, and Bernie, at least, has been afforded every opportunity to speak for himself.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.