Back in 2005, just one week after Hurricane Katrina wrought devastating damage upon New Orleans, NBC staged a star-studded telethon to raise millions of dollars in relief aid for the victims. That impressive and laudatory effort nearly 20 years ago points to the stark contrast vs. the media’s approach to the current devastation of Hurricane Helene across Appalachia.
The two storms are remarkably similar in their overall harms, by important metrics. For instance, during Katrina 2 million citizens lost enduring power, and now 1.5 million lose enduring power due to Helene.
But during Katrina, media coverage was absolutely non-stop, especially on the cable news networks. Those channels broadcast around-the-clock, intense coverage, most of which cast blame for the fallout on the Republican president in the White House, George W. Bush.
As an important disclaimer -- anyone who follows my work knows my deep antipathy toward W. Bush (and actually ALL the Bushes). So, I am not looking for reasons to somehow lift up President Bush the younger, generally.
Nevertheless, the contrast to that incessant news coverage can be easily proven from a couple of screenshots of the web homepages of both MSNBC and CNN, taken at 2:15pm ET on Saturday, October 5th.
The first one reveals a true news blackout – nary a single word about this massive story. Millions without power, likely thousands of dead, interstates wiped out, masses of people still trapped and often incommunicado. And yet, not a peep from the “journalists” at MSNBC:
The same wanton disregard over at CNN. That homepage at least had the decency to insert one small, tangential mention of Helene, but only in relation to another new potential storm, highlighted below. Like their corrupt brethren over at MSNBC, the “newsroom” propagandists at CNN seems to think that this national tragedy does not deserve real coverage:
As someone who worked as a paid on-air talking head for both NBC Universal and for CNN, I can say with real experience that this “news blackout” regarding Helene does not surprise me in the least. The broken legacy media in America has totally ceased to function as a reasonable Fourth Estate in this country.
The primary tasks of storytelling and challenging the powerful…those journalistic pursuits were abandoned long ago, giving way to incessant propaganda machines dedicated to pushing the prerogatives of the ruling class, especially Democrat politicians and their allies in Big Business.
Here is the bottom-line reality. With George Bush in the White House during Katrina and a victim class that was largely black and urban, the media saw endless opportunities for exploitation and narrative promotion. But now, with a Democrat Biden acting as the ostensible president, and the anointed (not elected) Kamala Harris as the new DEI darling candidate of the media, Helene becomes an inconvenient story, especially since the victims now are overwhelmingly white and rural (not to mention very MAGA-leaning).
No wonder trust in media plunges to all-time lows, especially among Republican voters. See this chart from Gallup:
Connecting all this back to presidential polling, in the state of Georgia, hit hard by Helene, prior to the storm a whopping 62% of voters believed that the American media works on behalf of Kamala Harris and against Trump, with only 28% disagreeing with that premise. Amazingly, even 44% of Georgia Democrats agreed about a thoroughly biased media. Again, this poll was conducted just before the storm. Unfortunately, the performance of the disgraced mainstream press during this storm only further reveals this media crisis.
Steve Cortes is former senior advisor to President Donald Trump, former commentator for Fox News and CNN, and president of the League of American Workers, a populist right pro-laborer advocacy group.
“Vladimir Ilych Lenin reportedly once said that ‘there are decades in which nothing happens and there are weeks in which decades happen.’” We are now in the midst of such weeks. Time is moving faster and faster. We will soon see what fate has in store for us.
Here’s an excellent video of Rep. Massie trying, and failing, to get some answers from a government official about FBI involvement in the Jan 6 “Insurrection!” A very good example of why I so totally distrust the despicable Democratic Party, their media, and our “fellow Americans” who support this monstrosity that has ruined our once great nation with their open borders, demonization of “Whiteness!” and their war on meritocracy which is being replaced with Equity aka race based Equal Outcomes. Excerpts below are from the description of the video. Trust is an essential ingredient for the cohesion of a country and ours is gone. Check out the comments on the video.
“Rep. Thomas Massie accused Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday of lying during a House Judiciary Committee hearing about his knowledge of federal law enforcement activities during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.”
“Massie (R-Ky.) previously tangled with Garland in October 2021 over the same issue, questioning whether undercover FBI agents were present at the storming of the Capitol.”
“Breaking: DOJ report shows FBI field sources stormed the Capitol on January 6th.”
LiveNow from Fox. Sept 25, 2024
https://youtu.be/aItGIPk0eKA?si=EPVSMB1J2jW6Bts-