• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, December 9, 2015

TV coverage of the 2016 presidential election has been dominated by the ratings gold mine that is Donald Trump. We saw evidence of this with his appearance on “Saturday Night Live” and the record-setting numbers realized during the Republican CNN debate in September.

Trump hasn’t only dominated show programming, he also completely dominates overall nightly coverage of the 2016 cycle.

The first 11 months of 2015 have seen more than 14 hours of 2016 election coverage, when you aggregate weekday-night coverage from ABC, CBS and NBC. This beats pre-election year coverage of the past seven presidential elections, going back to 1991.

Of the 857 minutes of election coverage, Trump has grabbed 237 -- 27% of the total. Talk about earned media. That is double Hillary Clinton, his closest rival in the coverage sphere. She has logged a
comparably measly 113 minutes on the three big broadcast networks — excluding Benghazi and email coverage.

Ted Cruz has only gained a total of seven minutes, and Bernie Sanders is at 10 minutes of coverage.

If you add all Democratic candidates’ coverage, they fall short of the total for Trump, the most divisive figure in politics we have seen in years.

The real question: Is Trump coverage is content or advertising? It’s probably a blend of the two, but he knows how to build a brand.

Theories abound concerning the Trump candidacy and his place in the Republican field. Is he a RINO (Republican in Name Only) who has figured out how to appeal to a previously untapped deeply conservative electorate? Does he really believe in the xenophobia he preaches?

Or, as our Editor in Chief, Joe Mandese, wrote yesterday, is he “consciously perpetrating an elaborate farce because he believes it is the only way to expose and reform what has happened to our political-industrial system”?

Whatever the case, TV loves Trump, and that won't change. With more voters starting to pay attention, we can expect Trump to continue his strategy of shocking — and then shocking some more. A plan of action that has worked extraordinarily well so far.