The imbalance in coverage of the candidates’ character is striking, as is the lack of coverage about the economy compared with the controversies. Moving one week past the video release, between Oct. 15 and Election Day, roughly half (56 percent) of the stories about scandals and the economy mentioned Mrs. Clinton’s emails, and only a quarter (26 percent) discussed Mr. Trump and his imbroglios. A mere 7 percent of the stories in these last three weeks mentioned Mrs. Clinton and the economy (11 percent mentioned Mr. Trump and the economy).

These choices have consequences. According to the Gallup Organization, Americans’ reports of what they heard or read about Mrs. Clinton between June and September were mainly references to her handling of emails during her time as secretary of state. In contrast, mentions of Mr. Trump changed week by week, tracking what was happening on the campaign trail.

But before anyone blames the news media, it’s important to examine what the candidates themselves were talking about over the course of the campaign. If media reports reflect candidate discourse accurately, then it is not merely the media choosing to report on scandals. It might be at least as much the candidates’ choosing to campaign on them that results in unending coverage of traits and characteristics.

To figure out if this was the case, I used data from Kantar Media/CMAG on all the candidates’ campaign ads aired between June and Election Day. I coded all of the appeals in each ad and weighted the appeals by how many times the ads ran on television. Mrs. Clinton made more ads than Mr. Trump, and she vastly out-advertised him, running nearly three times as many ads as he did. All told, over half a million ads were run in 2016 during this period.

The content of the ads is revealing. Both candidates spent most of their television advertising time attacking the other person’s character. In fact, the losing candidate’s ads did little else. More than three-quarters of the appeals in Mrs. Clinton’s advertisements (and nearly half of Mr. Trump’s) were about traits, characteristics or dispositions. Only 9 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the economy. By contrast, 34 percent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the economy, jobs, taxes and trade.

Since the start of presidential campaign television advertising in 1952, no campaign has made 76 percent of its television ad appeals about any single topic. On average, traits typically garner about 22 percent of the appeals. The economy typically generates about 28 percent of the appeals. There’s usually much more balance.

Of course, this was an unusual election year, with two very unpopular candidates, so the candidates’ flaws may have simply been too big a story for either them or the media to pass up. Whatever the reason, the criterion of fitness for office dominated the Clinton campaign’s messaging and made up a good share of the Trump messaging as well, and the news media covered it.