Yesterday’s outbreak of tornados that ripped through the south and left 173 people dead, with more deaths expected, is being called one of the deadliest outbreaks in American history. You wouldn’t know this though listening to MSNBC or FOX. Instead they are focused on other issues, like the royal wedding and the birth certificate.
We have large towns in ruins, lives destroyed and millions, if not billions, of dollars in damage and our cable news doesn’t give a damn. This is a disgrace.
What’s even worse is while working on this post and having Morning Joe on, Joe Scarborough was talking about how the media is ignoring things like Afghanistan and then said if the President would stop talking about the birther issue then people might move on. Does Joe realize that he is part of the media? Does he also realize that the President addressed it once, yesterday, and that was only after the media spent the past several weeks fixated on the issue? You do realize that you are part of the media – don’t you?
But why would the media take any responsibility at all? Yesterday the President even called out the media for their obsession with the birther stuff and that upset Jake Tapper:
The president said he was prompted to act “two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.”
But the president was wrong.
According to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, that week the dominant news story was without question the economy.
The ridiculous claims about the president’s birth certificate actually was the No. 4 story for the week – receiving about one tenth of the coverage devoted to stories about the economy.
I really doubt Pew’s research on this also. I sit here with the news on most of the day and we have heard about birthers more than anything, but that isn’t the point. Even if this was the fourth story for the week, that’s still bad. A crazy ass conspiracy theory, sparked by racism, should not be receiving any media attention as all. Don’t tell that to people in the media like Tapper or Scarborough though. They apparently aren’t part of the media and neither is anyone else. Stories just get mysteriously reported and pushed by non-media types.
But back to the original part of my post. Let’s keep the south in our thoughts and prayers as they recover from this disaster. The media might not care what happened, but we sure do!
UPDATE:
The death toll has just been revised and now stands at 183.
UPDATE 2:
The death toll now stands at 194.
UPDATE 3:
The death toll has surpased 200 and now stands at 203.