In a five-minute segment on The Weekend Primetime, MS NOW anchors Catherine Rampell and Elise Jordan lamented soaring beef prices without mentioning the substantial environmental, public health, and animal welfare costs that are routinely externalized by the beef industry.
While interviewing a barbecue restaurant owner whose business is impacted by the high prices, the anchors and their colleague, Pablo Torre, demonstrated their bias by referencing “juicy burgers” and a “growling stomach.”
The mainstream media routinely portrays meat as a cultural treasure, an economic engine, or a victim of market forces. The animals themselves are invisible, as are references to the dire environmental consequences of beef production, including greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation and the public health concerns associated with the consumption of red and processed meat.
Despite the long duration of the story, Rampell and Jordan did not interview nutritionists, environmental scientists, animal advocates, or any other experts who could have offered a broader understanding of beef’s impacts beyond restaurant profits. The result was a one-sided narrative which addressed the affordability of beef instead than the true cost of producing it.
If a news outlet aired a five-minute segment about rising cigarette prices and interviewed only tobacco retailers worried about declining sales, most news organizations would recognize that as incomplete reporting. Yet when the subject is beef, most continue to frame the story almost entirely through the lens of the businesses that profit from selling it.
MS NOW’s segment was presented as a business story, but it functioned as something else: a sympathetic portrayal of the beef industry that left viewers with the impression that the problem with beef is its cost. That is not balanced journalism. It is an example of how mainstream media outlets routinely normalize and promote meat consumption while excluding perspectives that might encourage audiences to question it.
VegMediaWatch reached out to MS NOW for comment.