The Women’s March occurred the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration – and it got coverage left right and center. You couldn’t turn on television or open up your Facebook newsfeed without seeing something about it.
Just days later another Women’s March would occur, but one expected to draw much less media attention, the March for Life. Despite attracting attendance in the hundreds of thousands each year, it rarely gets any coverage. The women’s march got 129 times more media coverage than 2016’s March for Life did. That’s despite the fact that when it comes to attracting protesters in D.C., the Women’s March got “only” 500,000, compared to regular crowd sizes of 600,000 for the March for Life.
Donald Trump didn’t want them to get shut out by the media yet again this year. He attacked the media for not covering the march (before it happened) in his interview with ABC’s David Muir.
The media as a whole took note of Trump’s comments – and actually bothered to cover the March for Life this year, perhaps out of fear of how Trump would react if they didn’t.
The big three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) dedicated 21 minutes, 52 seconds of coverage towards the March for Life. In comparison, they spent 1 hour, 15 minutes, 18 seconds (3.4 times more) covering the Women’s March on Washington. Still, that’s an improvement from covering the Women’s March 129 times as much (if the March for Life were to receive the same amount of attention as last year).
To put that in perspective, the networks spent almost 23 minutes on the pro-abortion women’s march – before it even happened. But their nearly 22-minute coverage of the 2017 March for Life was still an improvement.
Of the networks, ABC was the only one to report on the 2016 March for Life, and only then in a casual reference to “high schoolers trying to get back to Kentucky” after the blizzard that hit the Washington, D.C. area. For that same show, the morning of Jan. 22, co-anchor George Stephanopoulos commented on the expected “tens of thousands” to “protest abortion.” Those two mentions amounted to 35 seconds.
H/T NewsBusters
No where near as much coverage as it deserved – but a large improvement, and all Trump had to do was talk.
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