Just as President Trump is insistent that Hurricane Dorian was projected to hit Alabama when he warned about the storm in a tweet, the media has furiously devoted too much time to the debacle, according to NBC senior media reporter Dylan Byers.
A White House official told the Washington Post that Trump used a sharpie to add a bubble so that a daysold map of Hurricane Dorian’s path included Alabama after his claim was deemed outdated by the press.
Byers told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle that while it is concerning Trump would tweet old information, the media has been going into overdrive when there are more important things to report on.
“I think it is also absolutely fair to question the mental fitness of a president who is so obsessed with proving himself right on this issue that it becomes a five-day story,” he said on Friday.
“I will also note though, at the same time, I do begin to wonder five days into this story if there’s not also a question to be raised on the media’s fixation with this story. I mean, at a certain point, like how much are we participating in a feedback loop and what exactly are we trying to achieve? Are we trying to demonstrate to audiences that the president and his administration are inept?” he continued.
Byers jabbed CNN for having big-name reporters write about the situation.
“I go to CNN.com and I see one of their foremost journalists, Jake Tapper, writing the lead story on the website about how Trump invited a Fox News journalist into the White House to convince him of this,” he said. “Not to sound like a politician, but there are kitchen table issues here that so many more Americans want to read about.”
Ruhle then joked to Byers, “I’m going to sound like an NBC employee, but why don’t you stop going to CNN.com and save yourself the time?”
Trump made a similar critique, tweeting on Friday, “The Fake News Media was fixated on the fact that I properly said, at the beginnings of Hurricane Dorian, that in addition to Florida & other states, Alabama may also be grazed or hit. They went Crazy, hoping against hope that I made a mistake (which I didn’t).”
