I have a theory about the disproportionate coverage of Trump:
TMZ, National Enquirer, and other tabloid outlets have been piling cash for as long as they could point their cameras/keyboards towards a public celebrity meltdown. The public cannot get enough of that stuff.
Traditional, "respectable" news outlets generally refrain from covering those items. They focus on "news" events, geopolitics and the like and it's pretty dull by comparison. Now they finally have a chance to run click-bait headlines and blast Trump's latest gaffe in a sound bite on loop and watch their ad revenue spike. His campaign is, depending on your leaning, either the biggest clusterfuck we've ever seen at this level of politics or it's a brilliant stroke of iconoclastic genius. Either way, the public is lapping it up.
They don't really give a shit about the winner. As long as there are two parties, they'll have news. It's just that this time around they get to milk a little extra cream out of the cow.
Here's another theory.
There is NO SUCH THING as "respectable media outlets" any longer. Hasn't been for a long time.
Did you bother to watch the way they propped up and defended Obama while simultaneously demonizing GWB?
When you have Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann, CNBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, all skewing hard left for years how can you even posit what you did?
When a Pew survey shows that 61% of media members identify as liberal and 9% identify as conservative (with the rest marking "moderate" which actually means 'left leaning') how can you legitimately claim this is some new phenomenon?
The same Pew survey showed that the vast majority of journalists felt Bush should have been treated MORE harshly than he was.