This week will mark the three month anniversary of Hurricane Irma hitting Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017, knocking out power for over a million people. Not far behind Irma came Hurricane Maria, which made landfall on Wednesday, Sept. 20 — wreaking devastation in both places, which is still an ongoing crisis. There are well over a million fellow citizens on the islands who still do not have electricity or water that does not have to be boiled. Many have not had power or potable water since Irma.
How in the hell are we allowing this to happen?
We are all well aware of the criticism and blame for this debacle, laid at the feet of Donald Trump, his federal agency appointees, the military he commands, and the continuing failure of the Republican controlled Congress to act effectively to end the suffering. I think it is also time to look back over the last three months to assess media coverage, and issue a report card. The media, in its role of providing news, information and public education on issues and events, had and has a key role to play in this debacle. We should also see where we, as people who utilize social media platforms, can make a difference going forward, since this disaster is nowhere near its end.
Thanks to a few intrepid journalists, an outspoken mayor, a celebrity chef, and a Broadway composer-lyricist, some mainlanders who knew next to nothing about our island compatriots are learning about place names and the plight of people in Puerto Rican municipalities like Orocovis, Utuado, Humacao and Loiza. Sadly I have seen almost nothing on the USVI and areas in the USVI like Coral Bay in St. John. Puerto Rico is not San Juan, and Charlotte Amalie is not the USVI — both are simply the capital cities of these U.S. territories. Far too many politicians have made photo op trips to the capitals—including talkin’ out the side of his neck Paul Ryan (who is busy hitting the island with a disastrous tax bill) and not enough in-depth coverage has been done in the hardest hit areas. The social, political, historical and cultural context has actually been better reported far too often by comedic hosts like John Oliver and Samantha Bee.
One problem: According to polling post Maria, fifty-four percent of people polled on the US mainland didn’t even know that residents of the islands are U.S. citizens. In a USA Today poll conducted in March, only 47% believed that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth. That perception has been re-enforced over decades of hurricane coverage in the news, where headlines like these abound: “Hurricane Maria: Will it hit the USA? Here are the latest models.”
Here’s one from CNN:
There was immediate pushback about this on social media, which I wrote about in “Attention news media covering Hurricane Irma—Puerto Rico is part of the U.S.”—and, for the most part, major media outlets have corrected it.
The mainstream media was caught asleep on its feet at the outset of the Irma-Maria island disasters—which was documented in this September 28 report from FiveThirtyEight using Media Cloud data. ”The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico”:
According to one analysis of five political talk shows that aired the Sunday after Maria made landfall, all five programs combined to produce less than one minute of coverage dedicated to the crisis in Puerto Rico, and three out of the five shows didn’t mention Puerto Rico at all. Many observers are speculating that Puerto Rico’s status as a territory is one reason for both the lack of news coverage and delays in the delivery of aid. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists issued a statement calling on media outlets to cover this disaster more proportionally, and its spokesperson, BA Snyder, told FiveThirtyEight that the dearth of press coverage was “unacceptable.”
In October FiveThirtyEight reported The Media Really Started Paying Attention To Puerto Rico When Trump Did:
Once outlets started talking about Puerto Rico, however, the coverage wasn’t all about the hurricane’s devastation and the efforts to recover from it. Much of the media’s efforts went toward covering the controversial statements President Trump made about Puerto Rico. Trump repeatedly referenced Puerto Rico’s debt, engaged in a feud with the mayor of San Juan, suggested that Puerto Rican workers weren’t willing to help with the recovery effort, and blasted unfavorable coverage as fake. (And that’s just some of what he said on Twitter.)
In the two weeks following the hurricane, an average of about a quarter of online news headlines in our data set that mentioned Puerto Rico also mentioned Trump. About 10 percent of Texas headlines also mentioned Trump in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, and only about 5 percent of headlines about Florida also mentioned Trump in the two weeks after Hurricane Irma. When President Trump visited the island last week, just over half of the headlines that mentioned the territory that day also mentioned Trump, a far higher proportion than we saw when Trump visited Texas and Florida.
The same conclusion was drawn in this recent piece in The Washington Post: “The mainstream media didn’t care about Puerto Rico until it became a Trump story.” The Post article raises several important aspects of the problem:
Data from the Media Cloud project at the MIT Media Lab shows that U.S. media outlets ran 6,591 stories online about Maria from Sept. 9 through Oct. 10 (one week before the formation of each hurricane through one week after the storm became inactive). By comparison, news outlets published 19,214 stories online about Harvey and 17,338 on Irma. Many news organizations sent reporters to the island who did outstanding work in very difficult circumstances. But the numbers show many newsroom bosses didn’t judge the story as worthy of top billing. The Sunday after Maria hit the island, the New York Times front page had no mention at all of Puerto Rico, which was set aside in favor of stories filed from Florida, Alabama and Trump’s NFL tiff.
By contrast, Spanish-language outlets Telemundo and Univision News mobilized several teams (TV and digital) to report on the island. Dozens of journalists also contributed from the main newsroom in Miami on two special projects: a map with up-to-date information about damage in the 78 municipalities on the island, and a database that compiled information on members of the Puerto Rican diaspora trying to connect with family and friends on the island. When the media did finally start paying attention, it was sparked by political controversy stemming from tweets by Trump criticizing San Juan’s “nasty” mayor, while almost completely ignoring the dire humanitarian situation in Puerto Rico. TV coverage has fallen dramatically since Trump visited the island on Oct. 3, even though the situation on the island is still dramatic. Some are comparing Puerto Rico’s crisis to the situation of another poor community populated by another racial minority: Flint, Mich., where residents have been struggling for years to obtain clean drinking water.
Meanwhile over at Fox Spews, they held a discussion about media coverage.
I don’t watch Fox, though a lot of people do, and we should be aware of what mierda they are feeding to their viewers.
The WaPo article points to another major issue: the dearth of mainstream Latinx reporters.
In the case of Puerto Rico, where the main language is Spanish, the cultural gap may be one of the reasons the island is persistently undercovered by mainland media. While Hispanic America has been growing in size — representing 17.8 percent of the population now — U.S. newsrooms are not reflecting that change. Hispanics comprise only 5.5 percent of newsroom employees, according to the most recent American Society of News Editors newsroom employment diversity survey. Minority journalists of any background comprise just 16.6 percent of the workforce in U.S. newsrooms. Perhaps with a more adequate representation in the media, Puerto Rico — and Hispanic America in general — would be more visible to the rest of the country.
There are only a handful of Puerto Rican journalists in high profile positions in mainland mainstream news operations. The only major television news figure/personality who showed up in PR who has some connection to the island is Geraldo Rivera, who touted the Fox-Trump line (why is that not a surprise?). Don’t get me started on him—I could fill multiple pages—since I am one of the people who propelled him into the public eye, via recruiting him to be an attorney for The Young Lords Party (YLP) back in the late 60’s.
Juan Gonzalez, also from the YLP, has been visible on the alternative side of the fence, Democracy Now.
Juan González: Puerto Rico’s Financial Control Board Worsened Crisis After Hurricane Maria: (full transcript here):
...But I think the important—there are a couple of myths still being perpetrated that have to be dispelled. One is, of course, the president claiming that the Puerto Rican people and leaders are waiting for everything to be done for them. The reality is quite different. The resilience of the Puerto Rican people and the ability of people in all of these communities, many of them cut off from communications still, is amazing. For instance, you remember last week I was still trying to get information on my sister in the town of Cayey. Luckily, just yesterday, we found out that she and her husband are well, even though they have no electricity and still no communication. But somebody was able to get up and visit them in Cayey. But the amazing thing about the people of Cayey, that they themselves have organized—they managed to get to a website, where they’ve been doing videos of all of the different people in different neighborhoods, communicating with their own relatives. They’ve been able to organize themselves to begin clearing out streets of strewn trees and other blockades of the roads that occurred as a result of the storm. So people are helping each other out in all of these towns, while they await assistance from existing local government and federal government—federal government, the FEMA folks and the military.
The reality, though, is that Puerto Rico has essentially a novice governor, a young governor who, really, if it wasn’t for the fact that his father had been governor beforehand, would likely never have been elected last year, who—the governor of Puerto Rico himself has not—did not really prepare well for this storm.
But now, more importantly, the military, the general that President Trump sent to take charge of the situation in Puerto Rico just a few days ago, right away said he did not have enough equipment and supplies to deal the situation. Now, if there is one institution in the United States government that knows how to deal with Puerto Rico well, it is the military. For decades, up to 13 percent of the land of Puerto Rico was military bases, including the largest naval base in the world, Roosevelt Roads. The Ramey Air Force Base, strategic Air Force command base, was there. And so the military knows how to get around Puerto Rico, how to deal with the terrain of Puerto Rico. And the fact that the military was not sent in earlier by the president to be able to help the people of Puerto Rico, even as the storm was heading toward Puerto Rico, I think that was a strategic mistake. It was a blunder that now is still yet to be fully rectified.
Juan, who stopped writing his regular column for the NY Daily News back in 2016, should have been tapped by mainstream outlets. That is also true for Pablo Yoruba Guzmán, who did post an opinion piece for NBC News “Anger Is Overflowing on Puerto Rico's Crisis” and has the journalism background:
What is spreading ahora among Puerto Ricans and friends in these still anxious and frankly, horrible days since Hurricane Maria engulfed an island slightly smaller than Long Island, is an exchange of conversation that has ratcheted way past “Como está la familia?”
"How's your family?" “Have you heard anything?” “Yabucoa is practically destruído!” “Can anyone get word to Hilda Marrero in Ponce?”
That kind of talk is, sadly, still going on, as the days stretch towards a second week without proper communication. Without enough water, food and medicine. Without an answer for scared children and babies. Without enough to care for the elderly. You do not sleep until you know. One way or the other.
His credentials:
Pablo Guzmán is a longtime television journalist and music and talk show host in New York and Philadelphia, and has written for a variety of publications including the NY Daily News and the Village Voice. Pablo was also a founding member of the Young Lords.
He, like Juan, has not been tapped by talk cable or nightly network news. I give credit to The New York Times for having David Gonzalez on staff:
David Gonzalez is an award-winning journalist at The New York Times. Among other posts, he has been the Times Bronx Bureau Chief, the "About New York" Columnist, and the Central America and Caribbean Bureau Chief. His coverage has ranged from the Oklahoma city bombing and Haiti’s humanitarian crises, to chronicling how the Bronx emerged from years of official neglect, to in-depth reports on how Latino immigration is shaping the United States.
In addition to his print reporting, Gonzalez is a photographer and the co-editor of the Times Lens Blog, which has become the premier internet site for photojournalists from around the world
He wrote the very sad story of the death in Puerto Rico of a beloved community figure, Lorraine Montenegro, who we all knew from the Bronx.
A Life of Service Ends in Puerto Rico, but Lives On in the Bronx:
While President Trump was in Puerto Rico tossing paper towels to the survivors of Hurricane Maria, Joe Conzo Jr. was in the Bronx throwing a fit.
He was frantic after learning that his mother, Lorraine Montenegro, was dead in Carolina, P.R. Although she and her husband, Clemente Perez, had survived the storm inside the modest concrete home where they had planned to retire, her health had deteriorated. She grew weak. She had difficulty breathing. She was dehydrated. When she got to the hospital a week after the storm, she was intubated, but it was too late to save her. She died on Oct. 1, at 74.
…
This is the point where I should say I am friends with Mr. Conzo, who belongs to a group of Puerto Rican photographers who came of age when the Bronx was burning. In some ways, his mother helped us form the group, because she safeguarded her son’s photos of activism, hip-hop and salsa when drug use had sidelined him. She had a similar devotion to thousands of struggling Bronx residents who were helped by United Bronx Parents, the social service agency she helped found with her mother, Evelina Antonetty, in the mid-1960s.
There are some things that can only be written by journalists who have a connection to the culture they are writing about.
It isn’t that there are no up and coming Puerto Rican Journalists available to be hired, the problem is with those in charge of doing it. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies posted this story, “A New Generation of Young Puerto Ricans in Media & Journalism”:
For decades, media and journalism have been an important resource for the Puerto Rican diaspora. Newspapers like Pueblos Hispanos and Pa’lante informed the community of issues concerning the neighborhood, the island–and in some cases, they went one step further, providing an ideological nucleus for leftists, Nationalists, and intellectuals alike. It is a tradition that includes some of the most important figures of the early diaspora, such as Julia de Burgos and Juan Antonio Corretjer. The generation that followed gave birth to the Nuyorican movement, and the Young Lords, several of whom went on to have successful careers as journalists–most notably Juan González.
Today, media and journalism have obviously evolved beyond print into what is commonly referred to as New Media, which means that although the goal of journalists remains the same (to keep the public informed), the skills needed to do so now include digital platforms such as social media and other nascent technologies–tools which are available to journalists and in most cases, the general public as well. This in turn creates a surplus of content and ease of access to misinformation and viral content. So as we introduce you to this next generation of young Puerto Rican journalists, storytellers, media producers, and so on; it is not only to highlight the quality of their work but to encourage our readers to seek out reliable sources of information–especially at a time when “fake news” has challenged the integrity of that very work. So what better way to start than with some of our own. Check out the full (by no means comprehensive) list below:
There are also groups like The Center for Investigative Journalism (El Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) who do stories in Spanish and English and use multiple media platforms:
The Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI) is an award-winning editorial team out of Puerto Rico, consisting of journalists, photographers and editors. CPI’s stories have appeared throughout several global outlets and the group is considered one of the Puerto Rico’s most trusted journalistic organizations.
Inside Climate News had this moving piece by their founding co-director Omaya Sosa Pascual — “Reporting on Devastation: A Puerto Rican Journalist Details Life After Maria”:
Seven weeks after the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rican history—at many levels, in U.S. history—fewer than half of the island's 3.4 million residents have reliable electricity service. Safe, routine drinking water remains a problem for about half a million people. Communication remains a daily challenge. More than 250,000 people lost the roofs of their homes, and most of those don't even have a tarp to cover what is left of their properties. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans have lost jobs and have migrated to the United States. And, while the official death toll has risen past 50, there are the bodies of hundreds more people who have died since Maria struck who have not been counted.
This is why I am sure Maria has caused permanent change in Puerto Rico. I am certain that this generation will be forever marked by this extreme event. It is not overly dramatic to say that in our lives on this island, there will always be a pre-Maria and a post-Maria.
I remember clearly the first question I received right after the winds stopped: "What's the story?" a U.S.-based journalist texted to me on my cell phone's last breath of service after Maria finished destroying the island.
"This is the biggest catastrophe I've seen in my 44 years of life" was all I could say.
The journalist, from a national newspaper, asked if I had interviewed anyone yet. On the mainland, it seemed, they didn't get it. In Maria's wake it was impossible to go out and report. There was no electricity, telephone service, Internet or passable highways. All the trees on the island, it seemed, were dead or tattered. No stores or gas stations were open.
Step by slow step, some things are indeed coming back, but for the island's journalists, the recovery has been a struggle. As journalists, we are asking: How will Puerto Rico get out of this mess? But, with families and damaged homes and jobs, we are also asking how we can, as humans, recover our own lives.
They posted this interview with a family who had buried their father in the yard — one of the many uncounted deaths they have been documenting.
To do in-depth reporting on a disaster like Irma-Maria does not require that the reporter be Puerto Rican or Latinex, but it certainly helps if they are bi-lingual.
Jorge Ramos, who is much more well known by Latinex audiences, is doing crossover programming for Fusion. His newest effort is for Real America (watch full episode here): Puerto Rico in Crisis.
Jorge Ramos travels to Puerto Rico to assess the damage caused by Hurricane Maria. He explores what life is really like for millions of Puerto Ricans who are coping to live without daily necessities like power and water.
Activist groups have been producing their own documentaries:
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. A category 4 storm, it was the strongest hurricane to hit the island in almost a century.
Now, the people of Puerto Rico are hungry, homeless and dying. Many towns lack access to clean water, communication and transportation. And the mainstream news media has all but neglected the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico. At the same time, relief for Puerto Ricans has been slow and insufficient.
#PRontheMap is a grassroots media delegation devoted to reporting on, reimagining, and reviving Puerto Rico. Our crowdfunding campaign is currently trending and needs your support. Give now to tell the stories of Puerto Ricans from the ground up
If we want the mainstream media to do a better job, we need to pressure them to hire more diverse journalists and prioritize coverage of this disaster. MSNBC—which is considered to be the more liberal cable news channel—had only one person go the USVI. It’s no surprise it was Joy Reid.
Joy has had United States Virgin Islands delegate to the House of Representatives, Stacey Plaskett on her show several times. Essence reported her conversation with Joy about the USVI being ignored:
“Joy I can’t tell you the low morale that the people of the Virgin Islands have right now about how the federal government and [other] Americans feel about them, because we hear nothing, nothing of the US Virgin Islands,” Plaskett explained. She further expounded that residents are starting to question if they have been ignored due to the size of the islands. The U.S.V.I. has nearly 110,000 residents while Puerto Rico has 3.5 million.
Puerto Rico dominated news headlines last week as many celebrities lent their voice to the cause. Plaskett pointed out, “We have yet to see that level of interest on the ground in the U.S. Virgin Islands.” It’s also left Americans there wondering if it's because the USVI is a primarily Black territory.
Though the issue of race and racism has come up in relationship to Trump and his antipathies to people of color, I have seen no media coverage at all examining the intersections of race and class on the islands, exploring why certain areas are poorer (and darker) and consequently hurt more by the hurricanes’ impact.
Nor has there been much about the discrimination against Dominican undocumented immigrants.
Other under-reported issues are what is happening to island residents who have HIV/AIDS. Little mention has been made of the transfer of 1200 Puerto Rican inmates to Mississippi. The Miami Herald did cover the tribulations post Maria of the island’s addict population—a group I have worked with.
I could sit here all day making lists of what I would assign if I magically became an assignment editor at a major news outlet. Since there is no magic, we can try to make it happen via emails and phone calls.
In the discussion of media, I don’t want to forget radio.
NPR has, imho, been doing a good job covering both the USVI and Puerto Rico with stories like “2 Months After Maria And Irma, U.S. Virgin Islands Remain In The Dark.”
My own local Northeast Public Radio station has done a fairly good job covering stories that link the islands to the region, however the talk-discussion programs have been less than stellar, with no panelists who know more than what they read in the NY Times or WaPo.
There are also podcasts, notably from Latino Rebels, which are providing insightful coverage.
Here at Daily Kos, we’ve made a concerted effort to increase the number of stories related to Puerto Rico—which you can find (and follow) at the tag PuertoRico. Like most other media outlets, we have very slim coverage of the USVI.
You can help by doing some story writing—and if that isn’t possible, you can contact media outlets to pressure them to do more. You can also share the stories from non mainstream media to your social networks, follow and share the writers or groups on twitter, facebook and instagram.
Support: 21 US Virgin Island Relief Fund
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