Fox News Spent Less Than 20 Minutes Covering One Of This Year's Biggest Stories

If you've been watching NBC or CNN, you're probably aware that rape and sexual assault is an increasing problem among our military. An anonymous Pentagon survey reports that there were over 26,000 cases of sexual assault in the past year and the hits just keep on coming. Darin Haas, the manager of the sexual harassment program at Fort Campbell U.S. Army base in Kentucky, was charged with stalking his ex-wife and violating her order of protection. He was arrested on May 15. Just the day before, on May 14, Sergeant First Class Gregory McQueen, a soldier assigned to manage a Texas sexual assault program, was suspended from all duties. He was accused of maltreatment of subordinates including assault and abusive sexual contact. Jeff Krusinski, chief of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, was charged with sexual battery and arrested on May 6.

While this is a horrible problem in and of itself, a recent report by mediamatters.org reveals that Fox News networks have barely brushed on this topic at all. According to the article, from May 6 to May 19, MSNBC spent four hours and 56 minutes covering these cases. CNN spent one hour and 36 minutes covering them. Fox News couldn't have possibly covered the issue in detail, considering that less than 20 minutes of their time was spent reporting anything related to the topic.

While it's always been clear that Fox News and MSNBC have different coverage and agendas, it's unclear why Fox News spent barely enough time covering an issue that shouldn't really be controversial. (We can all agree that rape is a bad thing, right?) Perhaps it's that the Obama/IRS scandal is extremely important (I'm not kidding, it is) or maybe Fox is avoiding the topic in order to avoid sounding "too liberal." Another theory is that Fox could take the same stance as Donald Trump and oppose having both sexes in the military in the first place.