Presidential Campaign 2016: Candidate Television Tracker

As part of our efforts to leverage the Internet Archive's Television News Archive for understanding the role of television in politics, we've created the following dashboard, updated each morning, that records how many times each US presidential candidate was mentioned on each of the major television networks monitored by the Archive. These are based on scanning the closed captioning records of each broadcast, so are subject to some degree of error, so absolute counts may contain a certain margin of error. The Archive enforces a 24 hour rolling delay, so the most recent date displayed is 24 hours ago. The Archive currently monitors a selection of national networks (Aljazeera America, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Comedy Central, FOX Business, FOX News, LinkTV, MSNBC) and a growing set of affiliates across the country. While the Archive monitors many other stations, these are the ones that have mentioned the political candidates a meaningful number of times. All news shows on each station are monitored with the sole exception of Comedy Central, in which only the The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, and At Midnight With Chris Hardwick are monitored due to their focus on current events.

You can click on any point in the candidate timeline below to launch a search on the Television News Archive to return matching coverage. Note that a number of spellings for each candidate are included when the counts below are calculated, so you may get a more limited set of results when you search the Television News Archive using the candidate's full name. Remember that in contrast to the results on this page, the Television News Archive main search engine displays only the number of distinct television shows mentioning a candidate one or more times, NOT the number of times a candidate is mentioned like displayed here. Thus, the timeline below might show a canidate receiving 2,000 mentions on a given day, but when you click through to the Television News Archive, it might show only 100 matches - that means that those 100 shows collectively mentioned the candidate the 2,000 times and clicking on one of those shows will open an expanded view to see more searches from that show. Those wishing to export the data below in CSV format for further analysis, you can append "&output=csv" to the URL of this page to export the raw timeline in CSV format - make sure to divide all counts by the per-day totals to normalize for the weekly ebbs and flows of volume.

Email kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com with any questions. Permission is granted for any and all use of these graphs in media reports and academic research, please cite "Analysis by the GDELT Project using data from the Internet Archive Television News Archive."

You may also find the 2016 Candidate Word Clouds and the 2016 Candidate Web Tracker to be of great interest.

NOTICE: As of February 2016 we are adding in all of the new affiliate stations in different markets across the United States that the Internet Archive is adding as part of its coverage of the 2016 race. The "Television Network" dropdown below will continue to add new entries over time as the Archive adds additional stations and markets. This means that the various "Affiliate" options will be highly fluid and you should use caution to ensure that the composition of a particular network or market affiliate option has not changed when comparing over time. The National option will not change and thus can be used for more stable over-time comparisons. Note that most Affiliate options only go back to late 2015 or early 2016 and new ones are periodically being added over time. Some affiliate options may not generate data yet while the stations in that market come fully online into the Archive's processing infrastructure - in cases where there is no data, the graphs below will be blank.



NOTICE: As of December 2016 the Internet Archive is phasing out some of its local affiliate station monitoring that was stood up to monitor key campaigning periods. Keep this in mind when using the affiliate data that individual affiliates may come and go throughout the monitoring period. For example, Phoenix-area stations KNXV, KPHO, KPNX and KSAZ were added on August 15th and monitoring ended December 1st.