Bill Maher blasts media coverage depicting less than 1% of students protesting

Talk show host Bill Maher criticized the media for its surplus of reports on campus protests, as it wasn’t representative of the majority of students.

Maher spent a segment of his Friday episode of Real Time discussing the various anti-Israel protests that have broken out on college campuses nationwide. Universities like the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University began clearing encampments to make way for their graduation ceremonies coming up later this month. This required the arrest of some protesters who refused to leave, which resulted in misdemeanor charges such as trespassing and even assaulting police officers in some cases.

“It’s time for the media to admit they blew the whole thing way out of proportion because, as always with the media these days, they don’t cover what’s most important. Just what’s most fun to watch,” Maher said. “There are 15.2 million college students in the U.S. and 2,300 have been arrested. That’s 1/167th of 1% and half of the ones in New York weren’t even students.”

In the case of UPenn, 33 protesters were arrested on Friday. A university spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Examiner that only nine Penn students were among those arrested. The rest did not have any affiliation with the university, but all were charged with defiant trespassing and subsequently released from police custody. Officers discovered “heavy gauge chains, as well as smaller chains with nuts and bolts” in the encampment that were suspected weapons.

“But we were given the false impression that these protesters are the voice of their generation having found a cause for which they’re willing to go to the tens and to the barricades. Oh, please. These kids are more violent when their team wins a championship,” Maher went on. “When these kids chant, ‘The whole world is watching,’ they’re right but only because you a**holes with the cameras won’t show anything else. Isn’t there a bear in a swimming pool somewhere you should be covering.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) applauded UPenn for “making the right decision to dismantle the encampment” in a statement to the Washington Examiner. University leadership had been in negotiations with protesters for more than two weeks, and refused to meet demands for amnesty for all involved.

Maher cited a Harvard Institute of Politics poll, where those between the ages of 18 and 29 ranked the Israel/Palestine conflict as the 15th out of 16 “areas of concern.” Instead, their top three areas of concern were, in order, inflation, healthcare, and housing.