Last week, for the fifth week in a row, former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders were the two most-mentioned 2020 Democratic candidates on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, according to data from the TV News Archive accessed via the GDELT’s Project Television API. While the candidates as a group were mentioned fewer times last week than the week before, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, was mentioned more often, likely because he held a town hall on Fox News last Sunday. He was the third-most-mentioned candidate last week, up from fifth the week before.

Buttigieg boosted his cable news coverage last week How often each Democratic candidate was mentioned each week in news programming on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, counted by the number of 15-second clips that include each person’s full name Number of Clips Candidate Week of May 12 Week of May 19 Joe Biden 1,715 – 1,160 – Bernie Sanders 530 – 465 – Pete Buttigieg 277 – 310 – Elizabeth Warren 358 – 258 – Kamala Harris 343 – 238 – Beto O’Rourke 217 – 187 – Bill de Blasio 263 – 83 – Kirsten Gillibrand 82 – 74 – Amy Klobuchar 43 – 46 – Cory Booker 107 – 45 – Steve Bullock 162 – 42 – Eric Swalwell 14 – 25 – Julian Castro 13 – 24 – Tim Ryan 11 – 19 – Jay Inslee 21 – 17 – Seth Moulton 29 – 14 – John Delaney 2 – 13 – Andrew Yang 11 – 13 – Tulsi Gabbard 12 – 11 – John Hickenlooper 13 – 9 – Marianne Williamson 7 – 0 Michael Bennet 11 – 0 Total 4,241 – 3,053 – Includes all candidates that qualify as “major” in FiveThirtyEight’s rubric. Each network’s daily news coverage is chopped up into 15-second clips, and each clip that includes a candidate’s first and last name (found by running a search seeking an exact match for the name) is counted as one mention. Source: Internet Archive’s Television News Archive via the GDELT Project

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke held a CNN town hall on Tuesday night, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten him mentioned more often on cable news, which had been already been paying less attention to him in recent weeks. Sixteen major candidates were mentioned less than 100 times last week on cable news.



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Check out the data behind this series and check back each week for an update on which candidates are getting the most cable news mentions.