Presidential Race Leads the News

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s personal life once again drove campaign coverage last week, making it the No. 1 story.

In the wake of earlier allegations of sexual harassment, the November 28 news that another woman—Ginger White—claimed to have engaged in a 13-year affair with Cain had the media frantically assessing the fallout for his troubled campaign. That question was answered definitively on December 3, when Cain suspended his run for the White House. Overall, the 2012 presidential campaign accounted for 23% of the newshole during the week of November 28-December 4, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Interest in the campaign was especially high on cable news, where the subject accounted for 47% of the airtime studied. It was there that Cain tried to get in front of the story in a November 28 interview on CNN, and there that Fox News’ Sean Hannity provided a friendly forum for the candidate—but to little avail.