Coal Miners Go on Strike and Fox News Goes Silent

Early Tuesday morning, dozens of mineworkers from Alabama’s Warrior Met Coal Mine headed to New York City’s monetary district. There, they protested outside the Wall Street firms that personal controlling shares of their employer, together with BlackRock, the world’s largest asset administration agency.

Here was a scene made for TV: Burly miners that so usually shaped the backdrop for former President Donald Trump’s environmental rollback bulletins standing as much as rapacious companies that populist Republicans have railed in opposition to. And but the supposed right-wing populist media figures and politicians who declare to like coal and have trotted out former miners and guys in hard hats have been conspicuously absent from Tuesday’s media-friendly motion.

It’s not simply that Fox News uncared for to cowl the motion—in three months, it’s failed even point out the continued strike that it’s part of. More than 1,000 Warrior Met coal employees have been on strike since early April, first over unfair labor practices after which preventing for truthful phrases on a union contract. The story is an actual scandal: After the mine’s earlier possession declared chapter in 2015, Wall Street companies purchased it up and considerably lowered employees’ pay and advantages. It’s a transparent assault on coal miners’ jobs, and but Fox News has ignored it fully.

When now-President Biden made marketing campaign guarantees to close down coal crops in an effort to deal with air pollution and local weather change, the community slammed him for threatening coal employees’ jobs. It did the same when he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. For that section, Fox anchor Carley Shimkus spoke with a former coal miner who addressed Hillary Clinton in the course of the 2016 election about her feedback on coal. Shimkus tossed just a few softballs after which ended by noting “we can see that American flag behind you, we know that you’re a patriotic guy, and we’re so happy that you landed on your feet.” When Biden made out of contact remarks about how coal miners ought to study to code, Fox and Friends’ Rachel Campos-Duffy called it Biden’s “‘deplorable’ moment,” referencing feedback by Hillary Clinton in 2016 as a result of the community can solely relitigate previous grievances. (The community additionally went after Clinton repeatedly for her insensitive feedback that she’d “put a lot of coal miners out of business.”) And when Trump falsely promised he’d save coal, the community fawned over his promises.

At first blush, it might sound the Warrior Met strike would match completely into Fox’s narrative, what with working class miners from a Republican state heading into the large liberal metropolis of New York to confront the individuals who screwed them over. But now that coal miners really need assist, Fox News has given them nary a point out.

There’s a serious distinction between the local weather plans Fox’s hosts have decried and this strike: The former threaten coal bosses. After all, although Warrior Met has left employees with worse well being care and an absence of time beyond regulation pay, it’s awarded firm executives with bonuses of as much as $35,000.

That’s additionally why the channel by no means appears to report on how coal’s air pollution harms miners—one thing clear power insurance policies and a simply transition may cease—or how amid the pandemic, coal firms have been shedding employees in droves whereas defending shareholders’ earnings. It appears Fox News and Republican politicians themselves aren’t actually all that involved about coal miners whose livelihoods are underneath siege. It’s the bosses, not the employees, who it needs to guard.