Television news, with few exceptions, completely botched the unimaginable devastation that struck 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 eastern Tennessee, were hit with an almost biblical level of flooding, leaving a trail of impassable roads and collapsed bridges.
Why was this not the lead story everywhere?
To be candid, North Carolina is just a blip on the radar of the coastal media elites, dismissed as fly-over country. Most news organizations don’t have a single reporter based there.
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President Biden just put out statements over the weekend, adding to the sense that this wasn’t a Katrina-level crisis. I went to New Orleans eight months after that 2005 storm and was stunned to see mile after mile and after mile of uninhabited suburban homes damaged by the flooding.
Imagine if the same level of flooding hit northern New Jersey, right across from Manhattan. There would have been 500 times as much coverage. In fact, we had a real-life example in Superstorm Sandy, which rightly drew enormous media attention.
Many shows had their B teams in, with few taking charge and ordering a full-scale mobilization on the story.
I was just realizing the magnitude of the destruction on my show when leadoff guest Mary Katharine Ham, who’s from North Carolina, texted me an hour before airtime and pushed to cover the story that was being largely ignored. It was a packed program, but I gave her a couple of minutes to talk about it on “Media Buzz.”
By Monday, perhaps realizing that they looked terrible, TV outlets shifted gears and started constant coverage of the plight of North Carolina, interviewing local officials and survivors. But their journalists faced the challenge of getting to a mountainous region that was isolated and in some towns all but wiped out.
And yet the New York Times and Washington Post did a terrific job of getting their reporters to produce one front-page story after another from the city of Asheville, an artsy town partially submerged by the monster flooding.
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As the Times put it, the storm left “at least 37 people dead in the region and communities struggling to cope without water, food, power, gasoline and cellphone service.”
The Washington Post, from Canton, N.C.: “Doris Towers awoke to the beeping of her husband’s dialysis machine early Friday morning, meaning it had lost power. Her neighbor’s Christmas lights, still up from last year, had gone out. Those were early hints of Helene’s destruction to come. She hadn’t known a storm was on the way.
“Across the mountains in Swannanoa, Joe Dancy and Jenna Shaw got up before dawn to walk their dog and saw floodwaters creeping toward their house. An hour later, they were climbing out a window with the help of a National Guard soldier.”
Biden, who will visit North Carolina today – Kamala Harris is also planning a visit–addressed the nation on Monday morning with his trademark empathy: “I’m here to tell every single survivor in these impacted areas that we will be there with you as long as it takes.”
But the president, who kept coughing because of a cold, should have given that speech on Sunday. That would have spurred the journalists into action, because they often follow the White House, and instead left the impression that no one was in charge.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, visited a shelter in Valdosta, Ga., and said, reading from notes:
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“As you know, our country is in the final weeks of a hard-fought national election. At a time like this when a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out in need, none of that matters. We’re not talking about politics now. We have to all get together and get this solved.”
The important thing is that Trump, working with Franklin Graham, son of Rev. Billy, who heads a Christian relief group, brought plenty of supplies.
But the former president didn’t stay on that high road for long. He posted that Biden and Harris “have left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South.”
FEMA officials have been working furiously – more than 3,300 federal agents are on the ground–and Harris, canceling several events, returned to Washington for a briefing from agency chief Deanne Criswell, and addressed officials there about the “heartbreaking” losses.
Trump also claimed that GOP Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp had not been able to reach Biden. But Kemp told reporters he did talk to Biden and the president “offered that if there are other things that we need just to call him directly, which – I appreciated that.”
“He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said. “I don’t know why he does this. I don’t care what he says about me. I care about what he communicates to people that are in need. He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are.”
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Trump also suggested, without evidence, that the Biden-Harris administration is deliberately not helping Republicans in red counties.
Perhaps it was inevitable that partisan politics would hijack a crisis that has devastated many southern states. And I’m glad that cable news, having largely snoozed through the weekend, is now all in on the coverage.
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