If it seemed like Bezos got a lot of coverage for his space launch today, he did. Consider this:
Broadcast TV morning shows aired 212 mins of coverage on Bezos’ space flight (including additional run-over time to cover the launch live); in 2020, morning show programs on these networks aired 267 minutes of coverage of climate change.
H/T my @mmfa colleague @theodorejay
In fact, ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS This Morning aired more Bezos coverage today than they did on climate change in all of 2020 (this includes today’s Special Reports on their 9 a.m. hours)
We acknowledge that in 2021, corporate TV news -- the broadcast morning shows in particular -- have done a much better job covering the climate crisis.
But the problems with Bezos’ space trip receiving 86% of climate change’s total 2020 coverage in ONE DAY were wonderfully summarized in @mollytaft's terrific piece about news coverage of billionaire Richard Branson’s privately-funded space trip last week gizmodo.com/why-tv-is-so-b…
There’s no shortage of climate and environmental news that corporate TV news could be covering: extreme weather events, the fossil fuel lobby’s ongoing shenanigans, alarming new climate studies, and the economic ramifications of climate change.
Tweaking this concluding paragraph from our 2018 analysis of broadcast news coverage of royal baby Archie’s birth: mediamatters.org/abc/abc-news-s…:
There's a window of hope. But it's closing rapidly.
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