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After more than 5 million Americans reportedly participated in last weekend’s “No Kings” protests, Ari Melber is cautioning the media against moving on and treating the growing Trump resistance as just another headline.
“Much of the political world has moved on, and the D.C. press — and again, like any grouping, there’s caveats and exceptions — but a lot of D.C. press view this as a one- or two-day story,” Melber said. “But is it?”
“I want to go through the evidence that states otherwise, that we are not witnessing some small or routine thing, but rather a gigantic awakening and ongoing effort to resist what are extreme, sometimes rare events coming out of Trump’s White House,” Melber said, referencing some of Donald Trump’s recent actions, like sending the National Guard into California to counter protests against his administration’s immigration policies.
“Honest press is supposed to be honest, not catering to a bottom line,” Melber said.
Melber suggested that part of the reason why the large-scale anti-Trump protests weren’t getting “accurate” coverage could be because of the changing media landscape: “Much of the more modern new media spaces are on digital and podcast platforms, and they currently lean right, and that might be a space where the protests are not a weeklong story, not something they’re celebrating, maybe not something they even want to get into the day it happens.”
Melber also criticized mainstream outlets for their coverage of the protests, citing a recent piece from The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan, who wrote that “many large media companies are afraid that prominent protest coverage will be criticized by the political right as partisan, and they can’t bear that label.”
“But honest press is supposed to be honest,” Melber said, “not catering to a bottom line.”
Melber compared coverage of the Trump resistance to another major protest movement from recent political history: the Tea Party. According to Melber, that movement was treated by the media “as a huge, big, important deal.”
“It was treated as a political fact among many outlets and D.C. types that the Democrats and Obama himself, newly elected with a mandate, would have to take this seriously and respond to the concerns of this big protest movement,” he said. “It was covered more than one or two days, and their turnout numbers were much lower than this past weekend. But many in the press thought the Tea Party was a game-changer.”
Melber cited an account from The New York Times in 2009, which estimated that one Tea Party demonstration in Washington, D.C., drew tens of thousands of Americans.
“That’s a big protest,” Melber admitted. “I’ve been to cover protests. Sometimes a few thousand feels like a lot, if they’re packed in and loud. Tens of thousands is certainly big, and you can cover it. But where does that compare to 5 million people in one day this weekend? Indeed, at their height, the Tea Party estimates … would be 1/20 of what we saw just this weekend alone — 20 times the number of protests.”
Despite those numbers, Melber said the anti-Trump resistance was still largely underestimated and undercovered by the media: “The narrators — whether they’re on podcasts or traditional D.C. media — might be missing it.”
You can watch Melber’s full critique in the clip above.