Our Election Coverage Snapshot
When Mike Bloomberg announced he was running for president on Nov. 24, Bloomberg News explained how we would handle our election coverage. We acknowledged the unique challenges of our situation and the electoral laws we have to follow, but we said we would show our independence by what we wrote and broadcast — and promised that we would be as transparent as possible about what we did.
The table below shows a broad audit of what we have done since his announcement through March 2 — the eve of Super Tuesday. It shows that over the past 3-plus months we have published around 1,100 stories and opinion pieces on the Democratic primaries and Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, ranging from longer features to quick campaign updates and blog posts. If we added in broadcast segments from Bloomberg TV, Radio and QuickTake, that total would be much higher. We focused on print, in part because, whenever we have done a significant broadcast interview, we have written a story about it.
We should stress again that this audit is a broad one and that categorizing stories is an inexact science: Some stories are tagged to more than one candidate; when it comes to Donald Trump, we have just used stories on his campaign; and short items are counted the same as long features. But virtually all the stories are listed and clickable below, as is the methodology, so you can look at the pieces and their context — and make up your own mind.
The following tables summarize the results:
Democrats
Republicans
Methodology:
* The analysis looked at presidential campaign stories that were published by Bloomberg News and Opinion on the terminal, most of which also appeared on Bloomberg’s Web site. To be included, the candidate must have been a primary focus of the story; at times, two or three candidates may be tagged. Passing references and standalone headlines are not included.
* Stories featuring multiple candidates, such as stories on poll results or broader themes, are categorized as “General.”
* Story updates were not included.
* Stories tagged to Donald Trump are identifiable campaign stories, not ones that are part of his role as president. If we included all the coverage on Trump’s presidency and the impeachment trial, that number would increase at least 20 fold over this same period.
* For the debates and the primary/caucus votes, where individual items on candidates could be identified, they were included.
* In addition, the Bloomberg terminal carries stories from many other news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press; all of these are available to our readers. We said in November that we would make sure that articles from these sources about Mike Bloomberg are prominently displayed. For the record, we have put almost 40 stories about him from these sources on TOP—the terminal’s equivalent of our front page.
Here is the list of stories: