The most over-covered story of the year according to MSNBC host Chris Hayes was the Knockout game, which he views as a “Fox News, Drudge obsession.”
Hayes announced his selection in his ‘All-in’ Awards “over/under-covered news” segment.
Knockout game coverage was spearheaded by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Sustern. Although some have been slow to come around, many other news outlets have indeed documented the knockout game.
Hayes showed a Fox News clip of its Knockout coverage which included former NYPD Detective Bo Dietl’s comment that the news media is suppressing the coverage. Dietl said that “the liberal news media doesn’t want to say exactly what it is — it’s gangs of black youths attacking whites.” Hayes appears to accuse Fox News’s coverage as being racist; he injects this comment after viewing the clip, “You get a sense of the racial politics and subtext well not even subtext… text.”
Ironically, earlier in the Award show, Nancy Giles was on from CBS This Morning, citing as her most under-covered story, “another stand your ground case” in which a young black teenager, Jordan Davis, was allegedly killed by a white assailant. She commented, “Just another young man lost for a ridiculous reason.” The coverage of this story is fair game for Hayes and guests; however, this seems inconsistent with their denial of Knockout game news coverage.
Heading the list of under-covered stories of the year, climate change is Hayes’s pick, as well as the increase in carbon parts per million in the atmosphere, which reached a “Landmark” 400 parts per million. Hayes is palpably astounded, lamenting that if it gets to 450, “Lord knows what?” He further exclaims, “That got zero, zero coverage.”
Perhaps scientists’ acknowledgment that global warming hasn’t increased in the last seventeen years has put a damper on the amount of news coverage it is receiving.