For most of the past decade TV news has struggled to adapt to the Internet era by employing sensationalism and tabloid scandal-mongering to boost ratings and save their failing industry. This seems like a scenario custom made for the political ascendancy of a faux-reality cartoon character like Donald Trump. In this environment a clown like Trump steals the editorial spotlight every time he belches out some typically ignorant and/or hostile opinion. He revels in all the attention he gets, despite the fact that most people are laughing at him. And the media regards their ratings as evidence that they are producing valid journalism.

So it is not surprising that when a new poll is published that shows Trump leading the pack of Republican losers, that the press will jump on that news and try to invent some sort of relevance to the state of the political landscape. In truth, Trump’s poll-topping position could not be more irrelevant. As reported here at News Corpse, polls that attempt to capture the mood of the GOP electorate at this early stage of a campaign are not particularly meaningful. Republican voters are as fickle as they are ignorant. Anyone who expects Trump’s polling to remain at these levels is woefully ill-informed about these election cycles.

While most of the media was pumping up Trump’s temporary and insignificant poll numbers, some other data released in the same survey was far more consequential and nearly entirely ignored. The USA Today/Suffolk University poll also did head-to-head matchups between Hillary Clinton and each of the GOP’s leading candidates. The headline that ought to have leaped out at the news editors’ desks was that “Hillary Clinton Beats All Republican Challengers.” That’s right, every last one of them, including the allegedly surging Donald Trump.

Clinton is beating Jeb Bush by four points, Marco Rubio by six, Mike Huckabee by nine, Rand Paul by ten, Scott Walker by eleven, Ben Carson by thirteen, and the Golden Boy of the quarter-hour, Donald Trump, by a landslide seventeen points. So Trump is actually faring far worse than any other Republican candidate against the likely Democratic nominee.

What’s more, an ABCNews/Washington Post poll shows that while Clinton’s favorables have risen to a majority (52%), Trump’s numbers, although improved, are still at 61% unfavorable. That includes 81% of Latinos (who Trump laughably said he would carry) having a negative view of Trump. And if further evidence of Trump’s unpopularity is needed, a Fox News poll last month reported that Trump led the field in candidates for whom voters say they would never vote. A substantial majority of 59% said that Trump would never get their support.

So why all the hoopla over a poll that shows Trump leading his Republican rivals? When there are sixteen candidates vying for the nomination, it doesn’t take much to grab the lead. Indeed, it only takes 17%, a number that no self-respecting candidate would ever brag about. It means that 83% of your own party’s voters chose someone else, or no one. Yet these are the numbers that the press has been hyping all day long, while virtually ignoring the far more significant results showing Hillary Clinton easily besting all of her GOP challengers. And her popularity is increasing even after a season of Clinton bashing over phony scandals about emails, charitable donations, and the unrelenting specter of Benghazi.

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For the record, this is not the first time that the media has ignored polling that showed Clinton beating her GOP rivals. Two months ago the same thing happened with a Quinnipiac poll where Clinton also beat every Republican they matched against her. It kind of makes you wonder whether they will ever report any poll reflecting positively on Clinton. Especially when there is hoax candidate like Trump in the race.