If you were one of the few non-Washingtonians to tune into this morning's political shows, you may have been surprised by what you didn't see: Any substantive discussion of the deaths of over 4,500 Americans in Puerto Rico.
Despite this less than a week old study, the major Sunday political talk shows -- which include CNN’s State of the Union, ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, and Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday -- were all silent on the subject. [...]
The media has routinely ignored the destruction caused by Hurricane Maria, dating back to just one week after the storm made landfall when these Sunday shows covered the devastation for less than a minute. Cable news quickly turned away from Puerto Rico following the hurricane as well. The day the Harvard study was released, cable news gave it 30 minutes of coverage that was drowned out by ten hours spent on Roseanne.
It's the deadliest natural disaster to strike the United States in over a century, and the political ramifications of the Trump administration's delayed and lackluster response are considered, by the top political wags of our time, to be inconsequential.
This is not surprising. The Sunday shows are establishmentarian by design. The entire premise is establishment members probing other establishment members for gossip about establishment members; you earn your ticket on the Sunday shows by being white, male, and important. This is not a crowd interested in probing the failures of either government or journalism; it is explicitly not a crowd interested in probing whether their fellow cast members might be incompetent, corrupt, or worse.
But due to this exceedingly narrow demographic, it is also not a crowd that might muster much interest in the plight of Americans who (1) do not have a vote or (2) are predominantly brown. Both of those things are nonstarters, for a segment of journalism premised on sipping tea with the political aristocracy. It is not in their wheelhouse; it is likely the hosts, selected for other talents, could not muster up a sensible conversation on the subject if they tried.
The Roseanne story, on the other hand, is of immediate and unapologetic importance to the denizens of the Sunday show circuit. Roseanne Barr, a celebrity, lost her access to a television camera due to saying something so vile that her public patrons could no longer stomach an association with her; if you are a top member of the punditry crowd, paid very very handsomely for saying things in public that often border on the racist, the elitist or the outright sociopathic, there may be no more pressing fear than that you, too, may be someday be called to account after a similar botch. Now this story, mind you, is important. This is not a story of celebrity downfall; it is a story of that worst of all possible demons, the Freddy Krueger that lurks in every pundit's darkest dreams: consequences.
To a crowd paid to swim through the public mind with the likes of Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Giuliani, or to pundits regularly offering up anything from corporate-funded propaganda to full-throated defenses of war crimes, the notion of a public comeuppance for a lifetime of advocating for monstrous things could certainly be seen as the most pressing possible news of any given week.
We have been here before. There have been other celebrities to have said vile things and faced public scorn; they have been hot topics on the punditry shows. There have been other government failures that impacted thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans whose names the Sunday pundits do not know; they, too, have slipped past with only token comment. It is a product of the system, and one not likely to change so long as the Sunday shows retain their current role as public tea-time for a rotating roster of pundits and lawmakers that is, between all the networks combined, still considerably smaller than any given year's NFL rosters.
Are you a politically active celebrity or hanger-on who has suffered that worst of all possible establishment-imagined repercussions, consequences for voicing an exceedingly vile opinion in public? You will get sympathy on the Sunday shows, and a lot of it. Are you a member of the general public suffering from months of government neglect, rendering your water toxic or your electricity nonexistent? Your concerns will be noted in a ninety-second segment on a Tuesday morning. If you don't like it, you should have convinced the network to give you a show beforehand.