This is Trump’s America — a land where 4,645 brown American citizens dying in a largely preventable tragedy is less interesting than a single racist white woman getting canned.
That’s where we are. That’s what we’ve become.
Last week, a Harvard University study concluded that 4,645 Puerto Ricans had died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. And yet all anyone seemed interested in was the fallout from Hurricane Roseanne.
To put it in perspective, 50 percent more Americans died from Maria than from 9/11, and more than twice as many died after Maria than after Katrina. Katrina and 9/11 dominated the news cycles for weeks, months, and even years. What’s the difference between those three stories? Can it really be the color of the victims’ skin? How is that remotely acceptable?
The Columbia Journalism Review, one of the last bastions of real journalism in this country, has the gory details:
While media outlets from cable news to digital publishers obsessed over the cancellation of ABC’s Roseanne, a report on the staggering death toll in Puerto Rico has, in comparison, been met with relative silence.
Researchers from Harvard University estimate that at least 4,645 deaths can be linked to Hurricane Maria and its immediate aftermath, more than 70 times the official count of 64. The Washington Post’s Arelis R. Hernández and Laurie McGinley write that “the island’s slow recovery has been marked by a persistent lack of water, a faltering power grid and a lack of essential services — all imperiling the lives of many residents, especially the infirm and those in remote areas hardest hit in September.”
The Harvard study has a wide margin of error, but even at the low end of its range, the death count from Maria would place the disaster on par with the devastation wrought by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. The news received coverage from numerous outlets, but it was swamped by the firestorm surrounding the cancellation of a sitcom.
“I’ve gotten three times as many breaking news emails today about ‘Roseanne’ getting cancelled than I have about the death toll in Puerto Rico being 70 times higher than we thought,” Wisconsin Public Radio host Brady Carlson tweeted Tuesday.
Media Matters, which also called out the disparity in coverage between Roseanne’s firing and Puerto Rico’s ongoing misery, had a handy visual aid to help show us just how out of whack our priorities have become:
Maybe if Puerto Ricans got together and built a huge message on the beach out of the Maria wreckage saying, “Ivanka Trump is a feckless c*nt” (the equivalent these days of “SOS”) their story might get a little more traction.
Until then, we’ll just have to conclude that the media think one racist white woman’s job is more important than 4,645 brown Americans’ lives.
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