And then we got a surprising amount of media coverage.
At first, it wasn't in most major news outlets. It was in publications that focused on business, tech, and cars -- Fast Company, The Verge, Electrek. But eventually the coverage went national, in a way that protests for Mahmoud Khalil, for instance, haven't.
The Tesla protest movement got attention because it was a business story. Our scruffy little band (which became much bigger in the ensuing weeks) threatened the financial well-being of rich people, especially the richest man in the world, so our protests mattered.
Flash forward to today. Here's the front page of the New York Times website as I type this:
Here's The Washington Post:
Tariffs are a huge story right now, but they're not the only story. Right now the Trump regime is dishonestly insisting that it can't do anything to extricate a wrongly renditioned man from a Salvadoran torture prison, in defiance of the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. The Department of Homeland Security has just told a number of people, including at least one U.S. citizen, that they should self-deport. Harvard professors are suing the Trump regime over threats to cut billions in federal aid. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just denounced oligarchy in front of a crowd estimated at 36,000 people in Los Angeles.
And that's just a partial list of current news stories. But at the Times and the Post, the important news is tariffs, tariffs, tariffs.
The media cares what happens to rich people. News about business reaches a large audience of well-to-do readers and readers who want to be well-to-do someday. That's why there's a lot of business coverage in the most prestigious news outlets, and there are many publications devoted to business.
The media cares somewhat less about what happens to ordinary citizens. Every major newspaper has a section devoted to business, and a permanent "Business" tab on the website, but none have sections devoted to issues affecting working people. Labor issues don't get daily coverage, the way they did fifty years ago.
Our major media outlets don't think they need a front-page tab for democracy and human rights in America, even though that's a subject that needs to be covered every day now. There's good work being done on this subject in most major news outlets, but it's needs to be forced onto the front page, and often it doesn't linger for very long.
For those of us who oppose Trump, there's a lesson here: The media cares about money a lot more than it cares about human rights. So we need to keep protesting Tesla. We need to talk about the way Trump is damaging the economy. And we should accept the reality that while we also need to talk about Trump's horrific human rights abuses, they'll probably never get as much attention as a fluctuation in the bond market or a trade deal that changes the price of an iPhone. That sucks, but that's reality.
