The fixed airtime of television news amplifies the effects of agenda setting, making the narrative priorities of each channel readily visible. The timeline below shows the total mentions of "trafficking" on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News from July 2017 through present, using data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive through the TV Explorer. Instantly clear is that Fox News mentioned "trafficking" the most often in January-February 2019, the majority of it in the context of the border crisis and immigration. CNN and MSNBC gave the subject far less attention. In contrast, when Epstein was rearrested in July 2019, MSNBC led coverage, with CNN and and Fox News playing second.
Turning to chyron mentions, Fox gave equal airtime to chyron mentions of "trafficking" for both the immigration and Epstein stories. In contrast, MSNBC gave the Epstein story 15 times more chyron airtime than the trafficking dimension of the border crisis, while CNN gave it almost 5 times as much coverage.
In short, human trafficking in the context of the border crisis warranted little attention on CNN and MSNBC, while they devoted considerable airtime to the Epstein story, with MSNBC alone granting the story more than 4.6 hours of chyron airtime in July 2019.
