Evening News, Sunday Morning Shows Ignore Largest Academic Strike in U.S. History

This past week, NBC News, ABC News, Fox and CBS News ran a total of 1 min 40 seconds of coverage of the 48,000-strong California University system strike.

The largest academic work stoppage in U.S. history, totaling almost 50,000 strikers, isn’t national news to our mainstream TV curators of what the public should and shouldn’t care about. 

A review of the 15 total nightly news broadcasts last week on the three major networks (NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, ABC World News Tonight), and the four major Sunday morning programs (NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, and CBS’s Face the Nation, and Fox’s Fox News Sunday) show that network news almost entirely ignored the California University-wide strike. 

ABC was the only network to mention it in any of their news programs. Good Morning America aired a 1 minute, 40 second segment on November 15. 

This virtual national TV news blackout comes as strikers enter their second week as 48,000 teaching assistants, researchers, postdoctoral scholars and other university workers are demanding bare minimum living wages amidst a housing crisis. In a recent union survey, according to the New York Times, “92 percent of graduate student workers said housing consumed more than a third of their income. For 40 percent of them, it was more than half.”

While online publications, newspapers, and a handful of local TV news outlets have covered the strike, nightly news broadcasts and Sunday News shows set the tone for mainstream political interest. Sunday morning shows establish what is on the national political agenda, and the average consumer of network news would have little-to-no idea such a major labor action was ongoing. NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation both aired 40+ minute sit-down interviews with former Vice President Mike Pence so he could promote his new image-polishing book. 

This week’s non-coverage is similar to the media blackout after the historic, first ever unionization of Amazon warehouses back in April. At the time, none of the major Sunday morning talk shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, or ABC’s This Week—mentioned the historic victory of the union drive at the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, despite it being the first successful vote to unionize an Amazon facility in the United States. In the six days that followed the vote, in 144 hours of programming, CNN ran only one 5-minute segment on the unionization on Sunday morning at 6:30AM EDT.

Needless to say, Starbucks employees going on strike at over 100 locations last week also merited no mention on the Sunday news shows. Labor coverage is almost entirely absent from these agenda-setting corporate news programs. It’s simply a non-factor. Only when a labor strike could potentially massively disrupt the flow of capital is it mentioned—like the possible rail strike last September—and even then it’s presented as a horserace story that could “impact the midterms.”  

Labor unrest is largely seen by US corporate media as niche, covered by beat journalists here and there but buried in section F and not something requiring urgent media attention, front page stories, or national conversation. It’s just background noise while our nightly news and Sunday morning program agenda-setters focus on horserace and palace intrigue in Washington.