It would be laughable were there not rampant devastation just off our shores, but the press is content to hammer away at President Trump over his supposed gaffe involving Hurricane Dorian and the state of Alabama. While the storm has moved on, the press has not. And all kinds of left-leaning reporters insist on beating the tortured horse that Trump made a most egregious error on hurricane notification.
What has these blowhards in a spin cycle to this day occurred Sept. 1 in a national address. The president showed a forecast map of possible impacts by Dorian, and he dared to take out a pen and extend the cone of probability to include portions of Alabama. Members of the media saw this and have been bleating about it day after day ever since.
Their outrage is about as accurate as a rainfall forecast six months from now.
At MSNBC they were still trying to ignite the wet fuse of this controversy, becoming stammering talking heads when conservative writer Rachel Bovard did the unthinkable and delivered facts. Over at CNN they've been especially dogged on this story, all while missing the point, contradicting their own on-air comments, and exhibiting an even worse grasp of geography that what they accuse the president of.
As the media developed this into a major story that was all cloudy haze and no landfall, it came to affect the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Contradictory statements have been made by officials regarding the Trump Sharpie forecast. It was soon after the president’s presser that Sunday when forecasters at an Alabama field office of the National Weather Service contradicted him and said the storm posed no threat. Then the NOAA headquarters spoke out against members of that Alabama location.
The press jumped in and declared that NOAA "was being bent" to make the president look good for political reasons. CNN has gone so far as to declare that the president failed a basic geography test regarding this forecast, a claim that is not only ridiculous but it makes the network’s own reporting look all the worse.
For starters, the president really managed to get network heads in a lather when he tweeted out some video that showed CNN on-air weather experts noting that Alabama was in fact targeted by the storm. This was compounded by members of CNN claiming they had never mentioned Alabama as a target. Then there was the small matter of this same network -- which claimed the president was a failure at geography -- completely showing ignorance of geography by mislabeling the very state in question on a map.
To see the level of desperation CNN has gone to to preserve its narrative on this matter, we need only look to the presentations from its self-styled media expert, Brian Stelter. ”This past week wasn't Sharpie-gate,” corrected the media guru, “it was ‘lying about a hurricane-gate’.” Stelter went on to state this was the biggest “lie” of Trump’s term to date. A rather bold pronouncement, considering his own network’s insistence for over two years he had been lying about Russian collusion.
OK, so this instance of drawing an arc on a hurricane map is the biggest lie told, Brian? Here are two details that will shatter your claim like a house-of-cards in a Cat 2 storm. Stelter has offered up this projection map as “proof” of Donald Trump’s lie:
That is a projected path of the storm CENTER. However another map showing the areas possibly affected by storm winds and weather has a much wider field, showing areas as far south as the Florida Keys, and as far north as ... Alabama.
Now, this is where all the facts come to rest and show where the lies abide. That second map was provided by NOAA. So when the president included Alabama in his Sharpie ad-lib, he had in fact been accurate. Provided is a tweet from NOAA, which includes both maps, and the importance here is the date -- Sept. 1, the date and time of the president’s presser.
Note as well that this means Brian Stelter selectively chose the upper map provided by NOAA, and excluded the lower map, in his explanation. This means it was he who lied in his description of supposedly proving the President’s error. The irony in all of this is how upset CNN personalities get whenever Trump states their network fabricates news.
Brad Slager, a Fort Lauderdale freelance writer, wrote this story exclusively for Sunshine State News. He writes on politics and the industry and his stories appear in such publications as RedState and The Federalist.
