July Was The Hottest Month Ever; Cable News Barely Noticed

Meh. It's just the earth.

WASHINGTON -- Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a dire report about the state of the planet: July 2015 was the earth's warmest month on record, dating back to 1880.

This wasn’t some one-off study. It was supplemented by similar findings from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Japanese Meteorological Agency; and, of course, it came on top of other studies underlining the perilous state of global warming.

But for how troubling the data point seemed to be, it got relatively little press attention, at least on the airwaves.

From the morning of August 20 through Sunday evening, the fact that the month we had just endured was the hottest on record was mentioned on major cable news networks all of 10 times.

MSNBC: Discussed the report five times, not counting the two repeats of Rachel Maddow’s show early on Friday morning.

CNN: Discussed the report five times, not counting repeat airings.

Fox News: Did not discuss the report.

To determine this, we searched the archive service TVEyes using the term “hottest month,” “warmest month,” “warmest period,” "July" and "hottest," and "July" and "warmest."

Just how little coverage is that? Consider this: During that same period, the name "Donald Trump" was mentioned more than 245 times on MSNBC, more than 265 times on CNN and more than 240 times on Fox News. Those numbers also don't include shows that reaired (including CNN's hour-long interview with Trump that was rebroadast several times), and they only reflect a TVEyes search for the businessman presidential candidate’s full name, not "Donald" or "Trump."

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