A Viral Twitter Thread Is Sharing Names of People Who Died in Puerto Rico After Hurricane María, Because Cable News Won’t Do Its Job

May 31, 2018
9:49 AM

We are taking a moment to fully support what Puerto Rican journalist Andrea González-Ramírez of Refinery 29 tweeted out on Wednesday afternoon:

The response, to say the least, has been real and raw and honest. Here are just few of the tweets:

#4645boricuas refers to the social media hashtag calling attention to the estimated 4,645 lives lost in Puerto Rico from September 20, 2017 through December 31, 2017, according to a Harvard study about the hurricane’s impact.

All this social media activity comes at a time when it was pretty clear that news of the Harvard study didn’t really dominate the cable news cycle, when compared with the coverage of Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet.

As a Media Matters analysis noted:

Cable news barely covered the report. The May 29 broadcasts of MSNBC combined with the network’s flagship morning show the next day spent 21 minutes discussing the findings. CNN followed with just under 10 minutes of coverage, and Fox covered the report for just 48 seconds.

By contrast, cable news spent over 8 and a half hours discussing a tweet from Barr describing Jarrett, a Black woman, as the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes and the subsequent cancellation of her show.

We are not surprised.