With the horse race portion of the Democratic primary contest behind them, party members gathered in Philadelphia last July to nominate Hillary Clinton and to hammer out the party platform. In speech after speech, including detailed primetime addresses by Michelle Obama, President Obama, and of course the nominee herself, Democrats laid out the party’s vision for the future. If ever there was a window of the campaign year when issues and policies were clearly at the forefront, it was the summer convention season.

So, how much of the news coverage from the four weeks surrounding the conventions centered on policy? For Clinton, just four percent, according to a study by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

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“Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1% of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4% of it,” wrote Harvard professor Tom Patterson.

And this is key: During that same summertime period, Trump received three times as much policy coverage as Clinton. Why the large disparity? “A major difference between Trump and Clinton’s coverage was that she had a news category entirely of her own—the emails that she sent and received as secretary of state,” Patterson explained. And as he noted, the vast majority of Clinton email coverage was negative.

So, during the convention weeks, the press spent eight percent of its time covering Clinton emails and half that amount of time covering all of Clinton’s policy positions. CNN’s The Situation Room seemed especially obsessed: Clinton emails represented 17 percent of the program’s Clinton coverage during the four-week summertime span.

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Those numbers certainly suggest that the press spends so much time and attention covering Clinton emails that there isn’t room left for policy and issues.

And that imbalance was before the FBI email “bombshell” late last week, which produced an almost comical spasm of media hysteria, punctuated by an avalanche of man-on-the-moon type of coverage. “Email” has been mentioned more than two thousand times on the three cable news channels since last Friday’s FBI announcement, according to TVeyes.com.

“Over the last few days, I've watched the best journalistic minds of my generation devolve into madness, frothing at the mouth over a story that neither they nor the voters they're successfully mis-educating seem to understand,” wrote Will Bunch at Philly.com

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And let's be honest, endless email coverage, most of which revolves around pure speculation, is just another excuse not to cover policy.

Last week, I highlighted the shocking revelation from Andrew Tyndall that the three network evening newscasts this year had aired just 32 minutes of in-depth campaign policy reporting. By comparison, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News devoted nearly three times as much coverage to the Clinton email story (100 minutes).

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