Surprised at lack of mainstream media coverage of Helene

[notanothernamechange24]

Is anyone else surprised by the lack of media coverage following the hurricane in America a week ago?
The images coming out of western North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia and Florida are really shocking.
Multiple towns destroyed. Roads washed away. Power lines down. Trees and debris everywhere.
Over 200 people are known to have died. 1400 more are still listed as missing.

But barely any mention on the news? Or am I just missing it?

Same with the flooding in Nepal. Mentioned once and then barely anything since.

And yet… one of the top stories on the bbc website is woman addicted to looking up properties on rightmove.
and she’s not even looking to move house! 😱

wtf is going on.

I remember Katrina had really wide (and distressing) coverage. There was literally a picture of a dead body on the front page of the Metro. Agree that the news coverage is very low key for Helene.

I hesitated for several days before posting this thread for exactly the same reasons. I was surprised that there was no other threads on it or even mentioning it.

I am a long time viewer of several YouTubers in the surrounding areas and some of the footage they have been putting out over the last week has been scary. Some of quite thought provoking too around being prepared and able to cope in these situations.

We can't do anything about it. And America is a rich country they can start their own rescue fund.

Agree. I had a meeting with a lady in Canada and a guy in the US. She asked him if he was ok after the storm and I was thinking “what storm?”

It missed where he lived but hit fairly near and I was really shocked when he started describing the damage. I figured I had missed the coverage.

Oh the $750 no one can actually get? Fab.

I hadn’t even heard about it until reading this thread. Listen to the radio all day and not been mentioned once, how bizarre!

Do we have to only hear news on things that we can help with?
We can't individually help with the situation in the Middle East either!

And yes sure America is a rich country. It doesn't make what's happened to people there any easier on an individual level. Plus there's estimates that a huge percentage of people in these areas didn't have flood insurance as it wasn't deemed necessary.

Some of the rivers were more than 20ft higher than normal! I can’t comprehend how long it will take to clear the debris, etc and rebuild the roads and bridges.

How do you even go about starting to repair the roads? The erosion of land is so vast. It's going to be a mammoth effort to get the infrastructure back. Rebuilding homes and property is going to be very challenging without a good road network to bring in supplies. It's going to take years.

There is now yet another Hurricane heading for the Gulf coast, scheduled to make landfall south of Tampa on Wednesday. Low lying areas like Anna Maria island have already been given evacuation mandates.

Is there somewhere to get information read about it? I hate that I looked but I looked at the US version of the daily Mail and the top 20 articles not one mention. Still seeing things pop up in Facebook feed looking unimaginable but nothing else

Here’s an overview page of The Guardian’s coverage: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/hurricane-helene

I have the NY Times as one of my feeds and their coverage has helped me understand what's going on.
But very little in the U.K. news.
I agree that the link to climate change needs to be shouted about loudly - it's going to be too little, too late soon.

To be honest there is so little in mainstream media it's tricky to find.
There's heaps on social media. There's some pretty harrowing footage on YouTube from various vloggers who live in the areas hit.
One I saw yesterday was basically saying the national guard had come in and marked over 100 places along their local river where there was suspected human remains. The woman talking was holding back tears saying she had been given body bags by the national guard to store in her car.

People just don't want to hear it. Look at how we treat climate protestors in the uk.
It's a bit like watching a slow motion car crash.

I think this is increasingly true of big weather events, that they’re not covered. I think there is some climate terror based avoidance going on in not covering it.

This is why I have a (very expensive) subscription to The Economist. Once I week I sit down and can read a summary of what’s gone on around the world. Usually pretty depressing but that writing style is brilliant and there are some moments of light relief with interesting stories from around the globe.

I haven’t sat down and watched TV news since HM the Queen died.

I guess the media giants don't want us to focus on the problems with continuing to burn fossil fuels, presumably because it might hurt their profits in some way 🤷🏻‍♀️

Well, many climate protesters are ridiculously annoying and ineffective.

Proper news coverage on environmental disaster like this would be far more effective but it is clearly absent.

My friends sons is out there and impacted and until my friend told me about it early last week I had no idea, she said it had been on news but perhaps I missed it. News seems focused on middle east conflict , assisted dying, pensioners fuel allowance, migrants and political scandal.

I saw and heard on radio 4 some coverage on the BBC but I was shocked by the number of deaths - devastating.

There are so many shocking stories too, like this one
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/06/us/helene-tennessee-factory-deaths.html

More and more heartbreaking footage coming out. Just saw a woman being interviewed who says you can smell the dead bodies decaying now. Some half buried in the mud, some up in the trees.

Because the tail end is coming our way