Pretty much like it covers climate change: Ignore it, and hope it goes away.
A meager 400,000 people showed up to Sunday’s People’s Climate March, according to organizers, so it wasn’t quite a tea party rally. As such, cable news’ resident global warming doubters spent the day pretending there weren’t hordes of people descending on the United Nations building. But it wasn’t just Fox News, according to a Media Matters survey of coverage:
Sunday news shows on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox failed to cover the People’s Climate March, a massive protest against climate change being held September 21 in New York City in conjunction with events in more than 150 countries worldwide.
Meet the Press, Face the Nation, State of the Union, and Fox News Sunday ignored the event […]
With the protests carrying over into a second day, however, under the banner of #FloodWallStreet (“The economy of the 1% is destroying the planet, flooding our homes, and wrecking our communities”), Fox found its opening: “There is a march taking over Manhattan’s financial district,” reported Ashley Webster of sister network Fox Business this afternoon. “Is the tone calm or agitated?” she asked a reporter on the scene, not leading the question at all.
“Well, it was calm, but it has become slightly more agitated in the last couple of minutes when a melee broke out,” responded the reporter as a few dozen people milled about in the background. “Things are starting to heat up just a little bit now … Now things are starting to turn just a little more angry.” There was at least one arrest, he said.
“Certainly the mood right now is agitated, I think is the best word,” he concluded by the end, as if prompted.
Fox News’ tabloid arm, the New York Post, got in on the undermining as well: “Climate change skeptics call out marchers’ ‘hypocrisies,” goes one report complaining about the litter left behind after the march, as evidenced by a single tweet.
#hippiehypocrisy, in other words.
