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Most 538 articles are pretty interesting to me, but since GAF loves Trump stories here is one about how his manipulation of the media is sustaining (or not) his poll numbers. It's a very long read, I have tried to clip out most of the main bits. I'm not clear on if he is citing newspaper data as the current "media coverage" as well as the historic.

tl;dr - Trump is a master of media manipulation and will sacrifice favorability ratings for short-term poll gains, the simple act of being mentioned so often in the media makes people think of him first, but the news environment is likely to change due to the potential ascendance of Cruz and the upcoming debates (spoilers: there's one tonight). The moment Trump starts getting less media coverage, his poll numbers are likely to slip much more drastically then they would for other candidates with more stable favorability ratings.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-boom-or-trump-bubble/

Understanding the dynamics of the modern media environment is an important skill for a candidate, and it’s a skill that Trump has mastered. But it’s also important to understand the effects that media coverage can have on the campaign and on the polls. By one measure we’ll get to in a moment, Trump has received about the most disproportionate media coverage ever for a primary candidate. The risk to Trump and candidates like him is that polling built on a foundation of media coverage can be subject to a correction when the news environment changes.

Since July, Trump has received 54 percent of the media coverage of the GOP primary — about six times more than Jeb Bush, who’s in second place with just 8 percent of coverage.

Trump isn’t the only candidate to receive such a large fraction of coverage in his primary — Hillary Clinton is getting 77 percent of the media coverage in hers, far exceeding Bernie Sanders’s 20 percent.

[...]

But Dole, Bush and Gore were much more dominant than Trump in the polls (not to mention other measures like the “invisible primary&#8221. So is Clinton this year. Trump has spent most of the year in the high 20s or low 30s in national polls (with some higher numbers recently — we’ll get back to those in a moment). That’s better than most observers, us included, would have expected. The other candidates I mentioned, however, routinely had — or have in Clinton’s case — numbers in the 40s, 50s or 60s in national polls, about twice Trump’s level of support.

Historically, in fact, there has been nearly a one-to-one correspondence between a candidate’s share of media coverage and his share of the vote in the polls. That is, other things held equal, a candidate earning 30 percent in national polls tends to get about 30 percent of the media coverage, while one polling at 10 percent will get 10 percent of it instead. It’s just that simple.

Thus, we can readily compare a candidate’s share of media coverage to his polling average. Trump, for example, has received an average of 28 percent of the Republican vote in national polls since July, according to HuffPost Pollster. Prorate that number upward to exclude undecided voters and candidates who have exited the race, and you get him up to 32 percent. By comparison, Trump has received 54 percent of the media coverage of the GOP race, so his media coverage has exceeded his share in the polls by 22 percentage points.

That is a big gap, although not the largest on record. Instead, the record belongs to Jesse Jackson, who received 33 percent of the media coverage in the run-up to the 1984 Democratic primaries despite usually polling only in the high single digits.

...in a regression analysis, the effect of media coverage on a candidate’s eventual share of the national primary popular vote is neutral, controlling for his share of the vote in polls. But media-dependent candidates have considerably more volatility and uncertainty in their results once the voting takes place; a higher share of media coverage is correlated with a higher error in predicting a candidate’s eventual vote share.

Here’s how that could be a problem for Trump. Despite how contentious the Republican race has become, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters are still considering multiple candidates and have a favorable impression of several Republicans. Trump has consistently led in polls when voters are asked for their first choice, but his net favorability ratings are only in the middle of the pack. In other words, he’s converting an unusually high percentage of potential supporters into people who list him as their first choice.

...a candidate can potentially gain in the polls in the short term by increasing his media coverage, even if he potentially hurts his favorability rating. Trump seems to realize this. So far in December — a month in which, among other things, he’s proposed to ban Muslims from entering the United States — he’s been the subject of 70 percent of media coverage of the Republican race, even higher than his long-term average of 54 percent. According to the regression, that extra media coverage is worth about 8 percentage points in the polls: almost exactly how much Trump has gained in national polls since the month began and enough to put him in the mid-30s in the polling average instead of the high 20s.

...the media’s obsession with polls can become a self-perpetuating cycle: Trump’s being in the media spotlight tends to help him in the polls, which in turn keeps him in the spotlight, which in turn helps in the polls, and so forth.

But that will change as debates occur more frequently (there are three scheduled between now and Iowa) and other candidates begin to drop out of the race.