Welcome to a Citations Needed news brief. We're going to quickly catch up to the media

coverage of Hurricane Harvey, the media's allergy to talking about climate change and

environmental racism and the class implications of the hurricane because we are left as

scolds and that's what we do. That's what we have to do. It's our job at it.

And to do that we're going to bring on Splinter News' Catherine Krueger, who's been doing

some good work following up with that over the last week. There hasn't been a lot of time

to dissect a lot of the media issues, but I think we're going to try to break those down

a little bit today, not too much.

One of the major media coverage problems with disasters in general, natural disasters

in general, tends to be not only the racialization of the coverage and who the victims are and

who the victims are not, but also what we have seen, which is possibly emblematic of a larger

problem, was actually distilled in a recent tweet by ABC reporter Tom Lommas, who was on

the scene in Houston covering the hurricane and actually tweeted out that he and his news

crew had informed police that they had witnessed looting and that now the Coast Guard was on

the scene and everyone was safe again.

Yeah, we talk a lot about the internalization of the needs of the state on behalf of the

media as a kind of ideological axiom without much thought. It's sort of assumed. Obviously,

you see this a lot with like, you know, the Washington Post at a Torah Board in New York

times at a Torah Board, when they're referencing the Pentagon, they'll say, we need to do this.

We need to do that. This is a more stark iteration of it that this guy saw himself as an arm

of the state, as an arm of the police. This is very common during natural disasters.

There was a, for example, and this isn't a natural disaster, but after the Boston bombing

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