Predictable: Telemundo Fawns Over Greta Thunberg

September 25th, 2019 3:44 PM

Telemundo continues to embarrass itself with its over-the-top climate advocacy, and with its fawning coverage of activist Greta Thunberg’s visit to the United Nations earlier this week.

Watch below as anchor José Díaz-Balart takes a full minute to introduce a report on the goings-on at the U.N., and on the streets of Washington, D.C., where activists disrupted traffic:

 

 

JOSÉ DIAZ-BALART, SENIOR ANCHOR, TELEMUNDO: The president is in New York, to take part in the U.N. General Assembly which begins tomorrow. Today, he made a surprise appearance at the Climate Summit. 

Now trending: Swedish activist Greta Thunburg’s fright upon seeing him. See for yourselves…

Right there. There you have the moment. President Trump had announced he was skipping that summit, but made a sudden appearance at the hall where it was being held. The face of Greta Thunberg, one of the most prominent protagonists against climate change, says it all.

Greta Thunberg’s speech at that summit is another one of today’s news stories. Such an impassioned speech is seldom heard at the U.N.

Between tears and anger the activist accused world leaders of doing nothing in the face of the threat of mass extinction. 

Meanwhile, dozens of protesters were detained in the streets of Washington. Javier Vega reports.

What we just beheld is one of the more egregious instances of bias by framing in recent memory. Telemundo, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, makes crystal clear that the main takeaway from Díaz-Balart’s lengthy segue into yet more puffery on Thunberg is, as shown in the chyron on this post’s thumbnail image, that Thunberg “does not hide her contempt for Trump”. 

Thunberg’s glare almost seems to be the focal point of the coverage. Díaz-Balart takes great care to note Thunberg’s “fright” upon seeing Trump, and to observe that her face “says it all.” One could say the same thing about the devotion and deference shown to Thunberg. The subsequent report centered around her speech at the U.N. and related protests in Washington, D.C.

It is safe to say that Telemundo’s fawning over Thunberg is par for the course, given the network’s previous embarrassing report, attempting to tie a half-century old glacier melt in Ecuador into the current “climate emergency” narrative. Like the rest of the media’s coverage of anything related to climate change, more focus is placed on personalities, and less on the real-term effects of the solutions that have been proposed so far.