MEDIA-The People's Climate March on Sunday was perhaps the largest climate change protest in history. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of New York City. Celebrities and high-profile politicians were among the marchers. The protest was a huge topic on social media.
All in all, it was a perfect opportunity for some of America's biggest news organizations to cover the topic of climate change, something that usually gets either ignored or badly handled. For Sunday talk show hosts, there was even a nice political hook, since the march was pegged to a UN summit that President Obama will be attending.
Well, so much for that idea. It seems climate change remains one potentially world-shattering issue that just can't get any respect on television. No Sunday morning show except MSNBC's "Up" so much as mentioned climate change, or the march, save for one stray reference on "This Week" by The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel. She pointed out that the march was actually gathering right outside the ABC studios in Lincoln Center where the show is taped.
"NBC Nightly News" was the only evening news show to do any segment on the march. (ABC devoted about 23 seconds to the topic in its evening show, and CBS spent exactly zero seconds on it.) Cable news, with the exception of Al Jazeera America, mostly looked the other way, besides a couple of segments on CNN and MSNBC.
Luckily for people who are actually interested in climate change, there were other places to go. The march received robust coverage online, and "Democracy Now" covered the entire thing live.
(Jack Mirkinson is the Senior Media Editor for The Huffington Post … where this perspective was first posted.)
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CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 77
Pub: Sep 23, 2014
