More than 200,000 citizens participated in a pro-family march last Monday in Puerto Rico, but this event, that the Huffington Post called “one of the largest pro-family demonstrations ever held in the U.S. commonwealth,” [1] received not even a passing mention on NBC, ABC, CBS or CNN.
A similar march also happened in France [2] in January, where at least 340,000 Parisians protested against a new law that would allow gay couples to marry and adopt children. Not surprisingly, this event was ignored by the same major news broadcasters.
You would think that an event that drew hundreds of thousands of protestors, on U.S. soil particularly would get some news coverage. Not only did television news ignore the story, but leading newspapers refused to report on it as well, including The New York Times, The L.A. Times, and The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, a Keystone pipeline protest, just a day before, received massive attention from the news media, despite having only a fraction of the turnout that the Puerto Rican protest had – an estimated 35,000 people. All three broadcast news outlets covered it from NBC [3], ABC, CBS, as well as CNN, MSNBC, PBS [4], Fox, and C-Span [5] and print publications such as the New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post and USA Today. It was also covered by NPR [6], and online media such as The Huffington Post, Daily Beast [7] and Mother Jones [8]. Despite the extensive coverage of the protest, San Francisco liberal news magazine “BeyondChron [9]” whined that the media was “downplaying” the “historic” protests.
The media love to highlight left-wing activists even when they are a minority compared to the large number of people who show up to support typically conservative causes like traditional marriage. But that’s not surprising. Journalists have been censoring conservative activism more and more often. Just recently a protest of 500,000 people was virtually ignored by the media [10]. Regardless of where you stand politically, censoring demonstrations that involve hundreds of thousands of people is just shoddy and deceptive reporting.