With news consumers especially hungry for information about Hurricane Florence, many mainstream media outlets have used that rise in viewership as an opportunity to bash President Trump to more people than usual. In fact, some of these new sources are even blaming the president for the weather itself.
As of Sunday morning, Florence has been downgraded to a tropical depression with torrential rain expected to fall throughout Sunday. The death toll as of Sunday morning had reached 15. Rivers are expected to crest in the Carolinas by mid-week with some major flooding expected. Tornadoes and landslides remain a distinct possibility.
All of this is upsetting news, but it falls short of the apocalyptic warnings from the mainstream media from earlier in the week. The words “catastrophic” and “Biblical” were peppered throughout media reports of the coming storm. Florence was a big storm — an awful storm, even. But Biblical?
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The media hype machine knows what sells. Tragedy and disaster. So, as viewership numbers rose in the leadup to Hurricane Florence’s landfall, so did its rhetoric relating to the storm. And with viewership on the rise because of the storm, how could the networks resist getting in a few shots at their true enemy, President Trump?
On MSNBC, Meteorologist Eric Holthaus suggested that President Trump had made the storm worse by undoing Obama era regulations and exiting the Paris Climate Accords. “We have a president who is denying the impacts of, you know, this hurricane season last year and this year and actively making the problem worse by, you know, not addressing this root cause of worsening storms.”
President Trump must be the most powerful president ever. He can even influence the weather.
Meanwhile, at CNN, during an ironically named segment called Reality Check, host Alisyn Camerota asked political analyst John Avlon whether President Trump was “complicit in this storm.”
Well, of course he was according to Avlon. “His policies have been tearing down our defenses to climate change, which is often to blame for extreme weather,” Avlon said. “On the same day Trump was discussing Florence, his EPA proposed rolling back restrictions on emissions of methane. That’s just the latest environmental policy targeted by the Trump administration.
Avlon went on to rail against the Trump administration for several Obama era environmental rollbacks — especially pulling out of the nonsensical Paris Climate Accords. The political analyst, who has no weather or climate related bona fides to his credit, hinted that the Trump rollbacks on Obama’s environmental policy could directly lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
“It is so bad according to two Harvard scientists, it could lead to 80,000 unnecessary deaths every decade,” Avlon claimed. “Warmer means more intense storms. When President Trump called Hurricane Florence tremendously wet, he was on to something.”
The 80,000 deaths were predicted by David Cutler, a public health economist and Francesca Dominici, a biostatistician. The two scientists, it should be noted, are neither weather nor climate specialists. Their study focuses mainly on air and water quality, which they expect to decline due to Trump policies, not on hurricanes. Nevertheless, the study does indeed claim that President Trump might be responsible for 80,000 needless deaths per decade, an estimate the study calls “conservative.”
Last week’s absurdity laden news reports actually began on Tuesday with a Washington Post editorial, which claimed that by ignoring risks associated with climate-change and rolling back Obama era mandates, President Trump was somehow “complicit” in Hurricane Florence’s landfall.
“Yet, when it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks,” the Post’s editorial board declared. The piece went on to claim that “there is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth’s systems to produce disasters.”
At least the Post was wise enough to put the piece on its Opinion Page, as the editorial had very little in the way of facts. The newspaper cited Al Gore acolyte Kevin Trenberth,but even the scientist could only offer opinion as the science linking increased rainfall during hurricanes to warmer ocean temperatures is only in the beginning stages of being understood, much less accepted by mainstream science.
Hurricane Florence was also an excuse to attack President Trump on FEMA’s response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year. MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell went after FEMA Director Brock Long on Wednesday, claiming that the federal government failed after Maria to properly assist those in need.
“The fact is,” Mitchell said. “Just as after Katrina, where there was infrastructure in parts of New Orleans, that is a federal responsibility. These are American citizens.”
But Long was quick to correct her. “Uh, no, you’re actually wrong on that,” Long countered. “It’s not a federal responsibility to upkeep the infrastructure. Actually, most of the infrastructure in this company is owned by the private sector.”
Mitchell also attacked Long on Senator Jeff Merkley’s claim that FEMA re-appropriated 10 million dollars in funds set to assist the victims of Hurricane Maria to ICE detainments. But those funds are earmarked for disaster relief. Appropriations rules do not allow it to be reallocated.
What Mitchell, the Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN are doing now is the same thing they’re doing in regard to the Russian collusion investigation. They’re throwing garbage against the wall in hopes that something will stick. It’s bad enough to do it in regard to the witch-hunt being conducted by Robert Mueller. When they do it surrounding a human tragedy such as Hurricane Florence, it’s simply disgusting.
Photo: IvelinRadkov/iStock/Getty Images Plus
