It’s possible that not even the most famous or infamous people of the recent or distant past — say, Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, Bill Clinton,
Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali or Adolf Hitler — dominated media as thoroughly at their peak as Mr. Trump does now.
Even when I found non-Trump news, though, much of it was interleaved with Trump news, so the overall effect
was something like trying to bite into a fruit-and-nut cake without getting any fruit or nuts.
My point: I wanted to see what I could learn about the modern news media by looking at how thoroughly Mr. Trump had subsumed it.
During my break from Trump news, I found rich coverage veins that aren’t getting social play.
The list includes Mrs. Clinton, who in January got $200 million in coverage, Tom Brady ($38 million), Kim Kardashian ($36 million),
and Vladimir V. Putin ($30 million), all the way down to the 1,000th most-mentioned celebrity in mediaQuant’s database, the actress Madeleine Stowe ($1,001).
In a single month, he received $817 million in coverage, higher than any single person has ever received in the four years
that mediaQuant has been analyzing the media, according to Paul Senatori, the company’s chief analytics officer.
In other words, Mr. Trump gets about $100 million more in coverage than the next 1,000 famous people put together.
And as important as covering the president may be, I began to wonder if we were overdosing on Trump news, to the exclusion of everything else.
Social signals also created a greater unpredictability of outcomes; when people could see how others had picked songs, the
collective ratings of each song were less likely to predict success, and bad songs were more likely to become popular.