Near the end of Friday's New Day on CNN, the show devoted three minutes to a piece by Bill Weir in which the CNN correspondent hyped a one-person weekly protest by a teenage global warming activist in New York outside the United Nations headquarters.
Co-host John Berman set up the report by recalling for viewers that student protesters around the world be protesting that day: "Children in 100 countries around the world are walking out of classrooms today to protest inaction on climate change, They say the governments are failing future generations by not cutting emissions and failing to get global warming under control."
Weir began his piece by informing viewers that the recent wildfires in California had frightened 7th grader Alexandria Villasenor into deciding skip class one day each week to protest outside the U.N.: "Every Friday, Alexandria Villasenor walks to the front of the United Nations and chooses this bench over 7th grade. It is a one-girl strike, and it started months ago after a trip to California brought her frightfully close to a paradise in flames."
After a clip of Villasenor recalling that her asthma was inflamed by the air pollution when she visited California, Weir continued:
It was so scary, her family sent her back to New York early, where she began researching how hotter fires, longer droughts, bigger storms are all being baked into her future, thanks to our relentless reliance on fossil fuels. And that is how she found another very worried teenager named Greta Thunberg.
Thunberg, a Swedish teenager who has previously appeared as a guest on CNN, was then shown at a conference giving an alarmist speech: "You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their very future in front of their very eyes."
Recounting Thunberg's history of one-person protesting, Weir showed another clip of her chastising adults for not doing more about global warming: "Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope, but I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful -- I want you to panic. I want you to act as if the house was on fire because it is."
For the rest of the report, the CNN reporter returned to Villasenor and her calls for a "complete overhaul of the world's biggest economy" to combat global warming.
As he concluded, Weir invoked the liberal March for Our Lives protest: "Inspired by the youth-led March for Our Lives, they are hoping that millions of kids across 60 countries make a statement that cannot be ignored: Change is coming, and action is needed, whether the grownups like it or not."
