The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico

[Madam45for2923]

Link to tweet

SNIP/
While Puerto Rico suffers after Hurricane Maria, much of the U.S. media (FiveThirtyEight not excepted) has been occupied with other things: a health care bill that failed to pass, a primary election in Alabama, and a spat between the president and sports players, just to name a few. Last Sunday alone, after President Trump’s tweets about the NFL, the phrase “national anthem” was said in more sentences on TV news than “Puerto Rico” and “Hurricane Maria” combined.

Those other stories are worth covering, of course. But compared to the other natural disasters of the past few weeks, Hurricane Maria has been relatively ignored. Data from Media Cloud, a database that collects news published on the internet every day, shows that the devastation in Puerto Rico is getting comparatively little attention.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-really-has-neglected-puerto-rico/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email
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[democratisphere]

1. MSNBC is on the plight of Puerto Rico around the clock.

[greatauntoftriplets]

3. So is CNN.

Just this morning I saw a Sanjay Gupta reporting on how his CNN team took a sick woman from the shelter in her small town to a hospital. That was just one report.

[LeftInTX]

4. I'm watching it on CNN

It did take longer to get going than the majority of disaster stories. Anderson and Sanjay are down there live.

[Igel]

5. The data speak for themselves.

Which is, I guess, why there's silence as to likely causes. Sentence counts are pretty mute.

We could consider some possibilities. There's racism.

There's the fact that we had really good action video and interviews for some and not others.

There's disaster fatigue. That makes it a bit surprising that Irma got so many hits.

There's the population count. 3.5 million versus fewer than that in just Houston or the greater Miami area.

There's the duration. A day versus days for Harvey, and Irma was up to bat over and over. Maria was sort of a runner getting to second base after the team scored couple of grand slams.

There's the range of effects. So Harvey knocked out fuel. Irma had its own set of surprises and problems. Maria just took a bat and PR isn't so interconnected.

There's competition. Harvey was really fairly alone. Trump was playing golf. Didn't pay much attention to Irma, to tell the truth. I'm in Houston and wasn't looking at the "far domestic" (as opposed to the "near abroad&quot . Maria had to horn in on Irma, and then there were other things. Including the Mexico quakes (which I have to assume weren't covered very much, either).

There's also the usual concerns about the data themselves, which in this case would be questioning the sources used for the sentence count.

There's familiarity. While I can't figure out who, exactly, all those who keep stressing that Puerto Ricans are Americans are offering rebuttal to, Texas and Florida are a lot more important to most viewers than Puerto Rico is. TV shows, travel, etc., etc. give them higher profile. (The problem is that the sources doing the stressing have listeners or readers who probably are mostly aware of PR's status. Those they're trying to teach aren't tuned in.)

How to quantify all of that, and what I've left out, dunno.

[Madam45for2923]

7. Yep! Many reasons & excuses!

[Goonch]

6. It's because of that BIG OCEAN! Everybody knows that.