Donald Trump has gotten so much free airtime from Fox News that he has boasted that it would be overkill to purchase ads.
Media Matters did the math (so we didn’t have to):
According to a previous Media Matters analysis, Trump far outpaced the other Republican presidential candidates in Fox News interview airtime in the second half of 2015. From May through December 15, Trump appeared on the network for nearly 23 hours—no other candidate had more than 10 hours on the network during that time period.
For this study, we updated Trump’s airtime totals through the end of 2015, which brought his time on the network to well over 24 hours for the year. Using this platform, including partaking in several-hour long interviews which were subsequently re-broadcast, Trump was able to benefit from at least $29.7 million in free airtime on the network and broadcast his message to a total audience of 306,104,725, according to media monitoring service IQ Media.
While Megyn Kelly has been a prime time Trump critic, the fact is that most of the rest of Fox cheerleads for Trump. You need look no further than the New Year’s Eve special in which Fox conducted its own countdown for him because the hosts were so busy slobbering over the Trump family that they missed the real countdown.
In October, Trump acknowledged the political “contributions” Fox has bestowed on him during one of those many, many appearances on Fox:
TRUMP: I’ve spent zero on advertising because you and Fox and all of the others, I won’t mention names. But every other network, I mean they cover me a lot, to put it mildly, and in covering me, it’s almost like if I put ads in on top of the program, it would be too much. It would be too much Trump.
Watch it below, from the October 13 Your World, via Media Matters.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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