On Texas floods, the media take their cue directly from the Democrats’ talking points
The most obvious explanation for why trust in media is at its lowest point in five decades is that much of what passes for news reporting these days is unreliable — sometimes intentionally so.
But there’s an equally credible, though less-discussed, theory for the trust gap: The news industry is rife with unlikeable creeps.
Take, for example, the smug, self-serving coverage of the deadly flooding in Central Texas over the July 4 weekend. Approximately 120 people across five counties have lost their lives. In better times, such a natural disaster would be met with a serious newsgathering effort and sober analysis.
Not so today. Instead, news of a deadly flood inspires a mountain of “told-you-sos” and partisan finger-pointing, as members of the press race each other to cast blame on their favorite political targets. Texas officials had not yet even begun to recover their dead before members of the press began to speculate that the Trump administration’s budget cuts and layoffs had exacerbated the death toll, their eagerness to link the deadly event with administrative reforms often accompanied by an outright admission that they had no idea if the two were connected.
On July 5, as efforts to recover bodies from flood waters began in earnest, CNN’s Juliette Kayyem said that one issue that must be addressed is “the question of what Donald Trump and the DOGE effort have done to the National Weather Service and [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. … [Did] those cuts mean that the team in place now maybe doesn’t have the experience, or there’s not enough of them?”
The National Weather Service office in New Braunfels, whose forecasts cover Austin, San Antonio, and the surrounding areas, “had extra staff on duty during the storms,” as the Associated Press ultimately reported in the early morning hours of July 6. The National Weather Service also said its offices in Austin and San Antonio had “adequate staffing and resources” to issue warnings, which they did on July 3, before the flooding began, and again on July 4 as the flooding intensified. Yet these on-the-record remarks did nothing to cool media’s zeal to tie the floods to the White House.
On July 6, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos said that he heard there were “significant staffing shortfalls to the National Weather Service offices in the region,” the obvious implication being that the White House’s recent budget cuts contributed to the disaster. The ABC anchor then turned the microphone over to former National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, who declared the recent budget cuts “will kill, over ten years, 100,000 people.”
“That is two thousand days of death like we’ve seen in Texas this weekend,” he added, getting the math slightly wrong. “In my 70 years, I’ve never been as embarrassed for my country on July Fourth.”
That same morning, CNN anchor Dana Bash said she heard that “two Texas National Weather Service offices involved in forecasting and warning about flooding on the Guadalupe River are missing some key staff members.”
“Do you have any indication whether those or other cuts helped play a role in the fact that the people in the flood zone were not prepared and certainly not evacuated?” she asked in a follow-up directed to Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas).
These and similar questions are mostly irresponsible speculation. For the genuinely unhinged stuff, we turn to CNN senior White House reporter Betsy Klein, who spent her Sunday insinuating that the recent budget cuts had indeed contributed to the death toll.
“I want to point out two additional things as we continue to track this federal response,” she said. “Number one is that the President has been deeply critical of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
“Separately,” Klein added, “the Trump administration’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget, which it’s already abiding by, offers massive cuts to some weather research labs that are vital to forecast extreme weather events like this. … DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, has also cut staffers at [NOAA] as well as the National Weather Service.”
Klein further demonstrated her disregard for the facts when she followed it up with a note of clarification: “It’s really too soon to know at this stage whether [the cuts] had any sort of impact on this notification effort. … The storm that created the conditions for this flash flooding was completely unpredictable, truly unprecedented.”
While we’re on the topic of clarifications and addenda, National Weather Service meteorologist Jason Runyen confirmed to the Associated Press on July 6 that the New Braunfels office had extra staff on duty for the flood, as is the norm for such weather events.
“There were extra people in here that night,” National Weather Service meteorologist Jason Runyen told the AP, “and that’s typical in every weather service office — you staff up for an event and bring people in on overtime and hold people over.”
“The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the catastrophic flood,” said CBS Austin meteorologist Avery Tomasco. “A flash flood warning was issued for Hunt and Ingram three hours before the Guadalupe started to climb. They did their job, and they did it well.”
Whatever. Details be damned — we have a narrative to sell!
Is it “fair to say that we are taking action as a country to basically lessen our readiness, to lessen our ability to protect people and warn people in the face of this kind of disaster?” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked on Monday.
In a smaller but equally loathsome corner of news media, the Buffalo News this week published a political cartoon, titled “Swept Away,” featuring a drowning man in a red “MAGA” hat. The cartoon depicts the man’s (presumably) final words, which are: “Gov’t is the problem, not the solution.”
It’s unclear whether the cartoonist, Adam Zyglis, felt similarly contemptuous of the 47 New Yorkers who died in 2022 during a five-day blizzard in the Buffalo area. He didn’t draw anything mocking the victims’ theorized politics, and the Buffalo News certainly didn’t print anything of the sort. When it comes to reporting and commentary, dead New Yorkers don’t get the same mistreatment as dead Texans. (This is something of a trend, by the way.)
On July 8, CNN’s Kate Bolduan said of the flooding that there “are big questions being raised about the warnings that happened and the impacts also of cuts [that] the Trump administration had made to the National Weather Service.” However, she conceded in the next breath, there’s “no direct throughline” between the two.
PBS anchor Christiane Amanpour asked a guest (her own husband) if he’s “comfortable linking what just happened with the cuts that President Trump has enacted from day one in all the executive orders?” She added later that the Trump administration has “rolled back so much in the climate space … It’s almost as somebody said, ‘we are now sleepwalking into climate catastrophe.’”
Meanwhile, the British Guardian newspaper didn’t bother to obscure its intent with the “just asking questions” schtick, choosing instead to go directly for the jugular: “Deadly floods could be new normal as Trump guts federal agencies, experts warn.” You catch that? Budget cuts now actually cause the floods themselves.
Unsurprisingly, climate change zealots have lustily seized on the fatal floods as an opportunity to push their preferred narratives.
“The Texas Floods Were Made Worse by Climate Denialism,” reads the headline to a Bloomberg opinion article penned by Michael Bloomberg himself.
For the record, they’re still pulling bodies out of the water in Texas, but he already knows what happened. In related news, Democratic officials, including Castro and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), are demanding an investigation into whether budget cuts and supposed staffing shortages contributed to the overall death toll in Texas.
Imagine that. It’s probably just a coincidence that major news organizations and their staff parrot the talking points of Democrats, even to the point of the absurd. Or maybe not.
And people wonder why so few trust the news media anymore.
Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.