Hurricane Helene was a category 4 hurricane that made landfall in Florida on Thursday, September 26, 2024, and has since left an unprecedented trail of devastation that will take years for communities to recover from. The most severely affected areas, where many of the deaths and the unaccounted for have occurred, have been in Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas. Despite the catastrophic damage, much of the mainstream media has shamefully seized the opportunity to use the hurricane’s devastation as an excuse to propagate their political narratives and deride the republican base.
It had only taken a day following the landfall of the hurricane for media outlets to spring into action, using the tragedy of a natural disaster to score political points. The Guardian announced that Hurricane Helene had blown “climate deniers Trump and Vance off course again,” ultimately turning the tragedy of the hurricane into a means to peddle their climate change narrative. They even went so far as to frame JD Vance’s campaign cancellations, which resulted from the natural disaster, as running away from “the reality of the climate crisis.” Unsurprisingly, the media outlets who have jumped on the chance to spread their climate change propaganda in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene have conveniently omitted the two back-to-back hurricanes that wreaked catastrophic devastation over 100 years ago, in July of 1916, which led to what is somberly known as North Carolina’s Great Flood of 1916.
“If the former president and his cronies have their way, future superstorms will be much more chaotic and horrific,”The New Republic stated in a headline they had published on the same day as The Guardian, joining the ranks of media outlets who simply could not wait to politicize and fearmonger in the light of the hurricane’s destruction. While communities throughout the United States have been struggling to recover, the media has not relented in using their suffering to only attack a candidate for president, but to sway its voter base by fearmongering about the climate disasters that will supposedly follow if they don’t vote accordingly.
To make their actions even more palpable, the corporate media has used the hurricane and its tragedies to draw attention to, and ultimately fearmonger about, Project 2025; an initiative published by The Heritage Foundation and one that has been a popular focus of opposition among left-wing media circles and within Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. “How Project 2025 would treat Helene survivors,” was the headline of an E&E News article that further dialed up the fearmongering by claiming that the “conservative playbook for a possible Trump presidency calls for cutting disaster aid.” Other media outlets have also inserted Project 2025 into the conversation, among them being Capital B News who published a news article titled, “Project 2025’s aim to gut NOAA Make Storms Like Helene Even More Devastating,” parroting the claim that Project 2025 is the “conservative agenda.”
The media’s scaremongering tactics surrounding what would happen to disaster aid if Trump were elected is ironic, however, considering that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced on Wednesday, October 4, 2024, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “does not have the funds” for anymore hurricane relief. It’s also important to keep in mind that Trump has never associated himself with Project 2025 and therefore the media’s deceptive attempt in conflating the two, in the backdrop of Hurricane Helene, has served simply to smear his presidential campaign and the republican base.
With the presidential election coming up, it’s safe to say that the corporate media has proved it cares more about politics than they do American citizens, many of whom are presently picking up the pieces from a natural disaster that has upended their lives and those in their communities. While reporting the disaster on the ground in hopes garnering support for the victims afflicted would be something any reasonable journalist would do, many predominantly left wing and progressive media outlets have, instead, decided to victim blame, spread their propaganda, and sway vulnerable voters who have just experienced a traumatic life event.
Aviel Oppenheim is a writer and novelist with two independently published books under his name, which include the Ethics of Vaccine Passports: A Poor Bargain and his debut fiction novel, Abiden. He is also a senior editor at Materia+ and a contributor at Dissident Media.
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