MSNBC, Sunday Morning News Shows Completely Ignore Ohio Chemical Derailment
The disaster is being covered by corporate media here and there as straight news, but it’s absent from any political debate.
As The Lever’s David Sirota’s been pointing out on Twitter over the past few days, a review of MSNBC’s website and social media, and the transcripts for the three leading morning Sunday Morning talk shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, and CBS’s Face the Nation—shows that the potentially catastrophic chemical train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio is a political non-issue to our Center-Left political debate agenda setters.
It’s important to note that corporate media’s nightly news broadcasts and CNN have covered the derailment as straight news. But the coverage, while sometimes good at showing the human stakes and documenting the fears of those impacted, has been sporadic and largely based on simply repeating government and Norfolk Southern Railway’s claims with little push back.
It’s become popular for viral tweets this week to claim the media is “ignoring” the derailment, or “barely” covering it. And while this is a subjective claim, a better way to look at it is not a blackout of coverage—it’s a wholesale de-politicization of the coverage. Segments covering the disaster largely repeat state officials, local governments and Norfolk Southern’s dubious “everything is under control” statements. This coverage handwrings, but then moves on, without any mention of political factors that made the disaster more likely: decades of union busting and safety regulation gutting, the predictable failure of transportation regulators, and corporate cost-cutting.
The Ohio derailment is treated like an act of god, following the formula of tornados or earthquake reporting. But, as smaller outlets such The Lever, New Republic, The Guardian, Grist, More Perfect, and many others have been pointing out this is very much a political issue with political solutions in need of political accountability.
By way of comparison, MSNBC ran over 40 separate segments on the “Chinese spy balloon” media crisis that unfolded during roughly the same time period. Just the same, ABC’s This Week had 59 mentions of the spy balloon in its February 5 and 12 broadcasts. NBC’s Meet the Press had 57, and CBS’s Face the Nation had 47.
Environmental “accidents” are not treated as the logical outcome of shoddy safety regulations or enforcement, decade-long undermining of union labor, corporate cost-cutting, or bad federal policy—all in urgent need of accountability. They’re just random, unfortunate accidents with no Bad Guys. Letting a Chinese balloon into U.S. airspace, on the other hand, requires a full-court media press with Biden officials having to answer tough questions as to how they let this happen, what systems need to be in place to prevent a future “ballon incursion,” and how much money needs to be poured into the Pentagon to prevent such an incident from ever occurring again.
Because addressing existential questions over the Ohio train derailment could perhaps empower labor, question U.S. corporations, increase safety regulations, and hold both parties to account, there’s little incentive in our myopic partisan media to frame it as a political problem. So it’s neatly tucked away in the “natural disaster” genre of coverage. But because a “domain awareness gap” of spy balloons penetrating North America falls squarely into the “failure” that serves both parties, asks no difficult questions of the U.S. security state or corporations, and can only bloat the Pentagon budget, it’s seen as both extremely newsworthy and pundit-worthy. It fills two weeks worth of Sunday morning shows, dozens of op-eds and editorials, and becomes an urgent political question in need of a political response, rather than an Act of God that everyone can just forget about in two weeks.