While MSNBC—and most of the rest of the world, including Daily Kos —reported on the Supreme Court's marriage equality rulings today, Fox focused it's "news" coverage on the arrest of former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez.

You can watch the amusing (and revealing) contrast in coverage in the video at the top of the post, but it's not just that Fox didn't even report the DOMA ruling until several minutes after it became available, it's that they didn't even think it was an important enough issue to cover until after the ruling was revealed.

At 9:59 AM ET, they did tell viewers that a ruling was coming, but immediately transitioned back to the Hernandez story, which by that point wasn't breaking. And when the did finally start covering the ruling, the coverage was weak. In her initial coverage, Fox's Shannon Bream failed to grasp that the breadth of the ruling meant that Court not only invalidated the portion of DOMA dealing with Federal benefits, but had also effectively laid the legal groundwork for repealing the rest of it.

Then, after finally coming to grips with the breadth of the ruling, Fox went back to treating it like any other story. As Brian Stelter of the New York Times noted:





@brianstelter People might read into the fact that Fox News is the only network taking commercial breaks this hour. Three so far.

That was at 10:32 AM ET, less than a half hour after Fox's initial report. I get that they're in the money-making business, but for a news organization to take three commercial breaks after today's rulings is pretty pathetic. But given Fox's political views and outlook, I guess it's not surprising that their first impulse was to stick their head in the sand.

Please join us and call on Congress to finish the job that the Supreme Court started today. Sign the petition to pass The Respect For Marriage Act and support full marriage equality.