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,<br />Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali or Adolf Hitler — dominated media as thoroughly at their peak as Mr. Trump does now.<br />Even when I found non-Trump news, though, much of it was interleaved with Trump news, so the overall effect<br />was something like trying to bite into a fruit-and-nut cake without getting any fruit or nuts.<br />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.<br />During my break from Trump news, I found rich coverage veins that aren’t getting social play.<br />The list includes Mrs. Clinton, who in January got $200 million in coverage, Tom Brady ($38 million), Kim Kardashian ($36 million),<br />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).<br />In a single month, he received $817 million in coverage, higher than any single person has ever received in the four years<br />that mediaQuant has been analyzing the media, according to Paul Senatori, the company’s chief analytics officer.<br />In other words, Mr. Trump gets about $100 million more in coverage than the next 1,000 famous people put together.<br />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.<br />Social signals also created a greater unpredictability of outcomes; when people could see how others had picked songs, the<br />collective ratings of each song were less likely to predict success, and bad songs were more likely to become popular.
