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Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

It’s embarassing that this is so underreported in the US. This is a disaster at an epic scale and it’s just not received anywhere close to the coverage it deserves. I understand that America may not want to hear about thousands of people dying in Asia when Houston is submerged. That’s not moral but it’s not surprising considering human nature. But this is a bunch of Americans on American land.

It doesn’t help that the President has made it all about how he is the real victim while golfing in NJ.

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It really depends on what network you view. I encourage you to look at news sites across the political spectrum and see how they're covering the story. If you want the TL;DR of these see here: http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/?tfp_display=gallery....

It's on the front page of the Washington Post today.

A good amount of people watch cable news, and to their credit, both CNN and MSNBC have been covering this since it happened, although perhaps neither with the detail nor at the exclusion of any other news that Harvey got while the Houston flooding was at its worst.

Then again, the Harvey coverage faded rapidly in the days after the storm left Texas; the Puerto Rico recovery is still unfolding and gets a fair bit of television and press.

Perhaps there is a perception that this is underreported but I don't think so. The kind, nature, amount, and pervasiveness of the news coverage is simply a reflection that life for everybody else still goes on (or rather, has to go on), and even for the people of Puerto Rico that's bizarrely true in the worst possible ways [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374084

I think the quality and quantity of reporting coming out of Puerto Rico has suffered from both its political status and the fact that it is an island at a considerable distance from the mainland U.S.

However, I think the situation has been compounded by both the degree of damage caused by the hurricane and by the kind of damage. Something like 90% of the cell towers are offline and the landlines have been heavily damaged as well. So you have this problem where you can't get reporters in and you also can't get firsthand reports from locals out, either.

It seems like a clear case of no news is bad news, but how is the news media supposed to report "no news"?

>in Asia

I think you're misunderstanding.

This is Puerto Rico, a US territory. The people in those images are United States citizens.

Read two sentences later.

I think the original commenter was saying he could understand why american media focused on the flooding in houston rather than the flooding in southeast asia, but there’s no excuse for not covering puerto rico.

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