Rosanne's tweet eclipsed news of Puerto Rico hurricane deaths

Alicia Shepard

When asked about President Trump’s reaction to ABC canceling the hit TV show Roseanne, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed the question as irrelevant. 

“I think we have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now,” she sniffed.

But apparently, we didn’t.

Both the media and the president considered it Big News when ABC swiftly canceled Rosanne Barr's show hours after she sent an offensive tweet about former Obama White House aide Valerie Jarrett. (Barr tweeted that if the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”)

What wasn't Big News?

A Harvard study issued the same day estimating that more than 4,600 Puerto Ricans died as a result of Hurricane Maria — 70 times higher than the official government death toll of 64 people. Researchers believe the number is conservative, and would be higher if they included people who lived alone and died from the storm.

By comparison, 2,977 people were killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and 1,833 died in Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

And yet, one short indisputably racist tweet by a conspiracy-loving, Trump-supporting Hollywood celebrity turned the media on its head. Cable news spent more than 8.5 hours discussing the Barr tweet and its implications.

There is no doubt that's a worthy discussion, given that the country is clearly not post-racial despite having elected a black president. But the far more significant Harvard study was barely mentioned, according to a report by Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog.

MSNBC and NBC gave the study 21 minutes versus three hours and 39 minutes devoted to Barr. CNN gave the updated death figures for Puerto Rico just under 10 minutes while Barr’s fiasco got four hours and 49 minutes.  

Fox News covered the Harvard study, which was reported in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, for 48 seconds.  Not even a full minute. It devoted nearly two hours to Barr. 

Many newspapers, meanwhile, put the Roseanne story on the front page and tucked the Harvard study inside or, like USA TODAY, covered it online.

The death toll in Puerto Rico, which just to be clear is part of the United States, was higher than every hurricane but one in recorded history. (Between 8,000 and 12,000 died in the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900.)

Puerto Rico deaths stemmed largely from a lack of medical care, water, food, shelter and electricity in the months after the September 2017 Category 4 hurricane hit. It came less than two weeks after the island of 3 million had been slammed by Hurricane Irma. 

The president, whom Sanders said had more important things to worry about, didn’t mention the updated death count. Nor did he condemn Barr’s racist tweet, or talk about the need for tolerance and respect. He was too preoccupied with the apology that Bob Iger (the chairman of Disney, which owns ABC) gave to Jarrett.

He wondered why Iger didn’t apologize to him for "HORRIBLE statements" about him on ABC.

"Maybe I just didn’t get the call?” Trump tweeted.

Coverage of the humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico, which is far from over, has always been lacking. Even as Hurricane Maria struck the island, more media attention went to football players kneeling during the national anthem. From Trump on down, people don’t seem to be interested in the hurricane-devastated lives of Americans in Puerto Rico.

Maybe it’s because almost half of us don’t even know that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Or maybe it’s because Puerto Rico, while part of the U.S., is not contiguous to the continent. Or another factor that can’t be ignored is that Puerto Rico’s population is largely black and brown, which brings us back to racism.

“Top journalists and government figures rarely mention race as a factor in understanding Trump’s negligent response to the hurricane or the U.S. presence in Puerto Rico more generally,” Frances Negrón-Muntaner, a Columbia University professor, wrote in The Root. “In other words: Puerto Rico’s crisis is not generally seen as a racial matter. But it should be.”

The news media mirror society's interests in choosing which issues to cover and how much to cover them. Barr’s public implosion is worthy of coverage. But she shouldn’t matter more than real, entrenched societal injustices, like American citizens dying from lack of food, water or medical attention.

Alicia Shepard, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a longtime media analyst and a former ombudsman for NPR.