Tropical Storm Helene formed in the Gulf of Mexico on Sept. 24, its projected path already showing it making landfall at the eastern end of the Florida panhandle. By the next day, it had gained enough energy to become a hurricane.<\/p>\n
That same day, Sept. 25, the House of Representatives voted on a budget bill that would fund the government for a few more months, out past the presidential election. It was a continuing resolution, meaning that agencies would continue to receive the money they were already getting. If they needed more? Well, that would have to wait.<\/p>\n
One day after that, Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm. Over the next few days, it scraped through the southeast, unloading the moisture it picked up in the Gulf and drowning communities in North Carolina and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
On Oct. 2, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose department includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told reporters that \u2014 given the limits of the stopgap funding that had been approved \u2014 more would be needed to help the region fully recover.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting,\u201d Mayorkas said. \u201cWe do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what \u2014 what is imminent.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few minutes later, he clarified his point.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I mentioned, we have the immediate needs right now,\u201d Mayorkas explained. \u201cOn a continuing resolution, we have funds, but that is not a stable source of supply, if you will. This is a multibillion-dollar, multiyear recovery.\u201d What\u2019s more, he said later, \u201cwe can obtain spend-fast funds so that we can dip into funds that are slated for the duration of the year to meet immediate needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, we are meeting the moment,\u201d he said, \u201cbut that doesn\u2019t speak about the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
His comments quickly got picked up by the right-wing media ecosystem, including Fox News. But not all of his comments; the channel\u2019s on-air personalities mostly focused on the part about how FEMA didn\u2019t have the funding Mayorkas sought. Or, as host Trace Gallagher put it on \u201cFox News @ Night\u201d on Oct. 3, \u201cFEMA is apparently broke, at least the part of the federal agency that hands out money to hurricane victims.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gallagher quickly made a connection that emerged repeatedly in Fox\u2019s coverage over the next few days. Declaring that \u201cthe federal government has screwed up again,\u201d Gallagher chastised Mayorkas for saying \u201cthere is not enough money in FEMA to fund the remainder of the hurricane season, yet FEMA is still actively funding SSP, the Shelter and Services Program, which provides funding to illegal immigrants, money for everything, from housing, to clothing, to translation services.\u201d<\/p>\n
As The Washington Post Fact Checker noted Oct. 4, it was not true that funding was shifted from emergency management to aid immigrants \u2014 though that had happened during the presidency of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
The Fact Checker was responding to a claim from Trump that \u201cthey\u201d \u2014 the Biden administration \u2014 \u201cstole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them.\u201d <\/p>\n
It is also not true, of course, that noncitizen immigrants can cast ballots. But immigration is the central focus of Trump\u2019s campaign, and so nearly everything else gets presented through that lens. The election is at risk of being stolen, he and his allies claim \u2026 because of immigrant voting. FEMA is out of money to help Real Americans, they argue \u2026 because of immigrants. And so on.<\/p>\n
Fox News aired the Trump comments quoted above on the Oct. 3 episode of its show \u201cThe Five.\u201d Co-host Jesse Watters then reinforced Trump\u2019s claim.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, storm-ravaged residents are struggling to survive and begging for basics like food and water,\u201d he claimed. \u201cAnd FEMA is running low on funds because they\u2019re blowing it all on illegals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later that evening, host Sean Hannity made a similar allegation, claiming that \u201cthey took over $1 billion of FEMA funds supposed to be available for national emergencies \u2014 to help you the American people if God forbid there\u2019s an emergency as bad as this one \u2014 and they spent all of that money on their 11.5 million unvetted illegal immigrants from over 180 countries.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next evening, Hannity aired a clip in which Fox News reporter Sara Carter interviewed storm victims.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, the New York Post and some others have reported that basically FEMA has allocated $1.4 billion,\u201d she said, \u201cbut that money was allocated for illegal migrant crisis, not for hurricanes, not for natural disasters, for the illegal migration crisis. When you hear that as a taxpayer, what goes through your mind?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnger,\u201d the woman replied, understandably.<\/p>\n
Gallagher stoked the same sentiment during the Oct. 4 episode of \u201cFox News @ Night,\u201d encouraging viewers who might have been \u201csurprised to see that FEMA is funding illegal immigrants\u201d to weigh in on social media, promising them that some responses would appear on air.<\/p>\n
At times, Fox News\u2019s coverage has included corrections from the federal government. Watters mentioned one Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere did the money go? More than a billion dollars went to welcoming Biden\u2019s migrants,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, the White House says that\u2019s not true, but we have the tape.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Tuesday evening, Fox News reporter Chad Pergram broke news on his own social media account.<\/p>\n
Fox has obtained a fact sheet assembled by the majority side of House Appropriations Committee about disaster aid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It says that FEMA \u201chas enough funding in the short-term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.\u201d<\/p>\n
It also declares there is \u201cno\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2014 Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) October 9, 2024<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The channel had obtained a fact sheet produced by the Republican Majority on the House committee responsible for federal funding, Pergram said. The document reinforced that FEMA had necessary funding for the short-term storm response and that funding streams for storm response and immigration were separate. \u201c[T]he only connection,\u201d it states according to Pergram, \u201cis that both programs are administered by FEMA.\u201d<\/p>\n
As of writing, Pergram\u2019s report has been included in one story on FoxNews.com. The article, headlined \u201cResurfaced video shows FEMA worrying about faith-based partners\u2019 treatment of trans migrants at border,\u201d dedicates its final paragraph to summarizing Pergram\u2019s social media post.<\/p>\n
There are other articles at the site that offer information challenging the claim that FEMA is \u201cbroke\u201d and\/or that the agency has shifted disaster relief funds to aid immigrants. There have been interviews that aired on Fox News in which those claims were similarly challenged.<\/p>\n
But this gets to the tension that has undergirded the channel in the past decade: Is its mandate to retain viewers or to report the news? The former means amplifying and backstopping claims made by Donald Trump in order not to alienate them. (They saw the dangers that posed in the aftermath of the 2020 election.) Since Trump is so consistently dishonest, though, that means amplifying and defending false claims, which is the opposite of reporting the news.<\/p>\n
The channel often navigates this divide by differentiating between its opinion and news coverage \u2014 a line that\u2019s blurry in general and which is often blurred in the channel\u2019s programming. When Watters says \u201cwe have the tape\u201d in response to a White House denial or shows a Gallagher segment called \u201cCommon Sense Department\u201d in which he alleges that immigration is sapping disaster response money, what are viewers supposed to assume?<\/p>\n
We know what viewers are supposed to assume.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Tropical Storm Helene formed in the Gulf of Mexico on Sept. 24, its projected path already showing it making landfall at the eastern end of the Florida panhandle. By the next day, it had gained enough energy to become a hurricane. That same day, Sept. 25, the House of Representatives voted on a budget bill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10832,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}