FiveThirtyEight put together an analysis of the traditional news media outlets and their coverage over the past months of the devastating hurricanes that hit Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. What they discovered is that not unlike our current administration, the traditional media is a lot less interested in focusing attention and resources toward Puerto Rico.
TV news coverage reveals a similar trend. Data we collected from the TV News Archive shows that people on TV news shows spoke significantly fewer sentences about Hurricane Maria than about Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.Television Explorer tool which produces analysis by the GDELT Project using data from the Internet Archive Television News Archive. [...]
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.”
To put this into perspective, BBC News covered more than Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC while the storm was happening. The good news is that media outlets like CNN have begun to add more coverage of the subsequent humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico in recent days. Part of that coverage includes asinine soundbites from President Trump about the size of oceans. In FOX News’s defense, there’s a good chance that nobody at the channel or watching even knows that Puerto Rico is a part of the United States of America. Considering a recent poll showed that half of Americans asked didn’t realize Puerto Ricans are American citizens, my statement about Fox News wasn’t exactly snark.