Fox News wants you to think that a national movement of students walking out of school this morning, in protest of gun violence, was not a big deal.
According to NBC News, almost 200,000 people and about 3,000 schools across the country were expected to participate in today’s walkout, which began at 10 AM ET. The New York Times reported thousands of students participated around the city.
CNN and MSNBC devoted a fair amount of coverage to the student protests. Fox News, not so much. Media Matters crunched the numbers (so we didn’t have to):
In total, during the 10 a.m. hour, MSNBC spent the full 60 minutes on the student protests, not even breaking for commercials, CNN spent just over 21 minutes on the protests, making it the most dominant story of the hour, and Fox News devoted just five and a half minutes to the story.
Media Matters also noted:
Fox’s programming continued as usual, focusing on the upcoming confirmation hearing for CIA Director Mike Pompeo to serve as secretary of state, the Pennsylvania special congressional election, and the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. There was a “Fox News Alert” about the walkout at 10:03, but by 10:04, the network had moved on to another “Fox News Alert,” this time about Pennsylvania’s special election still being too close to call. Fox again ran a headline segment about the protests at 10:15, which also lasted just over one minute, and just one more brief segment later in the hour.
Furthermore, in its 10:03 “Fox News Alert,” co-anchor Bill Hemmer suggested that the walkout was a minor run-up to a larger demonstration on March 24.
HEMMER: We’ll remind you the calendar is March 14th and in 10 days, March 24th is the big planned, for the march on Washington that came out of Parkland and I would expect big numbers on that day, in Washington, D.C., 10 days from now and I would also expect a lot of demonstrations to happen, to take place at cities all across the nation. They say upwards of 600 different demonstrations could take place in different cities and, you know, 50 of those different states. So, we’ll see how many numbers they get, how many numbers they get for that turnout…
Ironically, as Hemmer spoke, B-roll footage showed rather large crowds in front of the White House.
As for FoxNews.com? Here’s that top story as I began to write this, about a half hour ago:
Watch Fox News’ downplay today’s student walkout below, from the March 14, 2018 America’s Newsroom, via Media Matters.