Television is a visual medium, and in our 24-hour cable news environment, it’s common to see anchors split their screens with video footage or graphics illustrating the story they are covering. But a chart CNN’s Ana Cabrera used to highlight a point about paid family leave was so tiny as to be completely unreadable.
Cabrera was interviewing Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) about the paid family leave provisions being considered in the spending bill being debated in Congress, noting that the latest version scaled back the coverage from 12 weeks to 4 weeks.
“It’s worth noting that federal workers like Members of Congress receive 12 weeks of paid leave, but there’s just no requirement right now in the private sector or the state or local government,” said Cabrera. “In fact, in the year 2021, the United States is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t offer a national paid parental leave program.”
As she introduced the graphic, Cabrera acknowledged that Thompson couldn’t actually read anything on the graphic she was about to put up.
This is the image that viewers saw. Unless they were watching CNN on a movie theater screen, it’s highly unlikely anyone could decipher any data whatsoever from that chart. Devoting one-third of the screen to the latest developments in the search for Brian Laundrie did not help.
Screenshot via CNN.
“I know you can’t read the country’s names that we’re going to put up here on the graphic, but when you look at this long list, it’s just incredible, the visual here of how we stack up,” said Cabrera. “The U.S. is all the way at the bottom with zero weeks. Estonia is at the top with eighty weeks of paid parental leave. Isn’t it long past the point of catching up to the rest of the world?”
Thompson called the provisions in the bill “an improvement over what we have now” and “a statement of our values that we recognize this as important public policy,” but even if he couldn’t get as many weeks of leave as he wanted, he thought it was still important to “begin the process” to provide at least some coverage.
Watch the video clip above, via CNN.