From PoliticusUSA, a reminder that the massive media corporations just aren't all that interested in covering anything that might give people (or politicians) ideas. After all, they'd rather pay out money in dividends than in salaries and benefits, right?
Over 100,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin were joined by thousands of other Americans around the country in protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from the state’s unionized workers, but you would not have known any of this if you watched cable news on Saturday as the coverage of the protests ranged from disappointing (MSNBC) to scant (CNN) to non-existent (Fox News).
AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale estimated that the crowd was over 100,000 people before the rally began at 3 PM. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, police estimated the crowd size at around 70,000 three hours before the rally began, “Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said the number of protesters around the Capitol is on the scale of last Saturday’s peak crowd of an estimated 68,000 and could swell even more for a 3 p.m.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country march on their governments in an event that would be a perfect fit for the 24 hour cable news cycle. Even better, the protests were occurring during the news cycle dead zone of Saturday afternoon. The coverage should have been everywhere in the media, but if you turned on your television in hopes of watching the rally from Wisconsin live, you were disappointed.
As the official state run television of the Republican Party, Fox News has been openly and loudly supporting Gov. Walker. It is no surprise that the right wing network would ignore the events in Madison and around the country today. A propaganda outlet never spends much time relaying information that is detrimental to their message.
CNN, which is supposed to be moderate network in the cable news ideological spectrum, sort of thought they should cover the story, so they did a few minute and half live cut ins here and there. No wall to wall coverage of course, but they at least managed to pull themselves away from celebrating the Tea Party long enough to take a quick glance at Madison.
Yes, CNN wished a happy birthday to the Tea Party. No, I'm not making this up.
You can read here about turnout in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Harrisburg PA, San Francisco, Charleston WV, Lansing MI, Salt Lake City UT, D.C., Annapolis MD and Richmond VA, St. Paul MN, NYC and Albany NY, Frankfort KY, Columbia SC, Boston MA, Albuquerque NM, Juneau AL, and Philadelphia PA.
Were you there?
