Campaign Action
The mainstream media is obsessed with Donald Trump. It has been this way for several years now, especially since he went from reality star to birther conspiracist to presidential candidate and, now, to leader of the free world. This has been detrimental in many ways because it has meant free publicity for all of his many lies and stunts, but it also means that coverage isn’t balanced (just ask Hillary Clinton). Sadly, the people and issues that need the most attention are being ignored while the media focuses on every Trump tweet, gaffe, and random argument.
Take Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, for instance. The mainstream media has lacked serious coverage of the storm, both before and after it struck the island. But the coverage only picked up when it went from a storm impacting Puerto Rico to a recovery effort that Trump botched.
But even those in charge of American newsrooms who are aware that Maria and its aftermath is a domestic disaster [since polls show that nearly half of Americans don’t realize that Puerto Ricans are US citizens] did not cover the catastrophe as extensively they did Texas and Florida, hit just weeks before Puerto Rico was by massive hurricanes.
National media only started to pay attention to Puerto Rico after days of silence by Trump (as they merrily jumped on the story, they seemed to forget the fact that they had also ignored the island’s plight). When Trump started a fight with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, Puerto Rico finally started to get more coverage.
This is what it means to live in the Trump era: 3.4 million Americans suffering through an unprecedented disaster for over two months can’t get media attention unless Trump is calling them financially irresponsible and engaging in a Twitter feud with a woman of color.
An examination of over 80 print and online media coverage across the United States shows that more than 1,100 news outlets carried stories about Harvey and Irma, the two other monster storms that struck U.S. soil this hurricane season, while only about 500 carried stories on Maria in a similar time frame. Overall, Hurricane Maria received three times as few mentions in text than hurricanes Harvey and Irma.
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.
But let’s also call this what it is. It is the people in newsrooms who decide what is news and what we should be paying attention to. Newsrooms are overwhelmingly white and male. And while the nation is indeed becoming more demographically diverse, that fact hasn’t meant that representation has reached newsrooms, or that the small amounts of people of color who are already in those newsrooms are telling diverse stories, or stories about people of color.
This lack of interest for some tragedies is a long-standing reflection of how the news business works. Cultural affinity shapes media coverage.[...]
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.
Bottom line: Puerto Rico, and what happens there, matters. It’s hard to imagine another disaster of this magnitude affecting such a large number of Americans and the media pretty much ignoring it. Honestly, one-day snowstorms and blizzards get more coverage than Hurricane Maria. And it definitely is telling that the only time this story pops back up again in the mainstream news is usually when the administration is doing something harmful, or that damages the recovery effort.
We need more diverse voices and points of view in mainstream news—period. But we also need to care about things because they are actually important, and not just because Donald Trump is a monster who can’t get anything right.