Television news, with few exceptions, completely ruined the unimaginable devastation that hit Western North Carolina over the weekend.
Once Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and headed inland, officials assumed it would lose strength. Instead, cities like Asheville and East Tennessee were hit by almost biblical levels of flooding, leaving a trail of impassable roads and collapsed bridges.
Why wasn’t this the top story everywhere?
To be honest, North Carolina is just a blip on the radar of coastal media elites, dismissed as flyover country. Most news organizations don’t have a single reporter there.
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President Biden just released statements over the weekend, adding to the sense that this is not a Katrina-level crisis. I went to New Orleans eight months after that 2005 storm and was stunned to see mile after mile after mile of vacant suburban homes damaged by flooding.
Imagine if the same level of flooding affected northern New Jersey, right across from Manhattan. There would have been 500 times more coverage. In fact, we had a real-life example with Superstorm Sandy, which rightfully attracted enormous media attention.
Many programs had their B teams, and few took charge and ordered a large-scale mobilization around the story.
Few media outlets – or politicians, for that matter – were willing to take charge, or take the high road, in their handling of Hurricane Helene. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
I was just realizing the magnitude of the destruction on my show when initial guest Mary Katharine Ham, who is from North Carolina, texted me an hour before going on air and pressured me to cover the story that was going on. being largely ignored. It was a packed show, but I gave him a couple of minutes to talk about it on “Media Buzz.”
On Monday, perhaps realizing that they looked terrible, the television media changed gears and began constantly covering North Carolina’s plight, interviewing local officials and survivors. But its journalists faced the challenge of reaching a mountainous region that was isolated and in some cities almost wiped out.
And yet, the New York Times and the Washington Post did an excellent job of getting their reporters to publish one front-page story after another from the city of Asheville, an arts town partially submerged by the monstrous flood.
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As the Times put it, the storm left “at least 37 people dead in the region and communities struggling to survive without water, food, electricity, gasoline and cell phone service.”
The Washington Post, Canton, North Carolina: “Doris Towers woke up to the beeping of her husband’s dialysis machine early Friday morning, meaning he had lost power. Her neighbor’s Christmas lights , still burning since last year, had gone out. Those were the first signs of the destruction of Helene that was coming.
“Across the mountains in Swannanoa, Joe Dancy and Jenna Shaw got up before dawn to walk their dog and saw floodwaters approaching their house. An hour later, they were climbing out a window with the help of a soldier. of the National Guard”.
Former President Trump already made a trip to Valdosta, Georgia, devastated by Helene. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Biden, who will visit North Carolina today (Kamala Harris is also planning a visit), addressed the nation Monday morning with his trademark empathy: “I am here to tell every survivor in these impacted areas that we will be there with you as long as necessary.”
But the president, still coughing from a cold, should have given that speech on Sunday. This would have spurred journalists to act, because they often followed the White House and instead gave the impression that no one was in charge.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump visited a shelter in Valdosta, Georgia, and said, reading from notes:
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“As you know, our country is in the final weeks of a very close national election. At a time like this, when a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out in need, none of that matters. We are not talking about politics now. We have “We all have to come together and solve this.”
Importantly, Trump, working with Franklin Graham, son of the Reverend Billy, who runs a Christian aid group, brought many supplies.
But the former president did not stay on that path for long. He posted that Biden and Harris “have let Americans drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and other parts of the South.”
Former President Trump claimed that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, was unable to contact President Biden. The last two have refuted it. (REUTERS/Anna Rose Layden)
FEMA officials have been working frantically (more than 3,300 federal agents are on the ground) and Harris, canceling several events, returned to Washington to be briefed by the agency’s head, Deanne Criswell, and addressed officials there about “heartbreaking” losses.
Trump also claimed that Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, had not been able to contact Biden. But Kemp told reporters that he spoke with Biden and that the president “offered that if there are other things we need, we can just call him directly, which … I appreciated.”
“He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said. “I don’t know why he’s doing this. I don’t care what it says about me. I care what it communicates to people who need it. It implies that we’re not doing everything we can. We are.”
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Trump also suggested, without evidence, that the Biden-Harris administration is not deliberately helping Republicans in red counties.
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Perhaps it was inevitable that partisan politics would take over in a crisis that has devastated many southern states. And I’m glad that cable news, which has largely been postponed over the weekend, is now fully present in the coverage.
