Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean heard her hosts attacking Houston’s Democratic mayor, Sylvester Turner, for not evacuating Houston ahead of Hurricane Harvey and she just wasn’t going to have it.
On Outnumbered today, Kevin Jackson, the show’s #OneLuckyGuy, made at least three gratuitous swipes at people over Harvey. One was at Hillary Clinton and another was at Mayor Turner. But before Turner, Jackson took a shot at Houstonians.
“Why didn’t people leave to begin with?” Jackson sneered, arguing that Houstonians know how readily it floods in Texas.
Cohost Harris Faulkner defended the people of Houston. “They’ve never seen this,” she said.
Cohost Abby Huntsman said it’s hard to know exactly where a hurricane would land.
Dean started to explain what meteorologists knew about Harvey and when they knew it but she interrupted herself to say that her IFB (earpiece) had been switched to another show.
You have to wonder whether a producer said something to Jackson in his IFB because he now backtracked his criticism of Houstonians.
JACKSON: I think it’s more of a sense of the desperation of people… You talked about $500 being the difference between paying bills and not paying bills for some of these folks that are now displaced. And I can only imagine getting that forecast and making that debate with your family of do we stay or do we go.
That’s when cohost Trish Regan interrupted to take a swipe at Turner which I discussed in my last post.
REGAN: Originally, the Houston mayor didn’t necessarily advocate that they leave.
JACKSON: Shame on him.
REGAN: Yes, shame on him.
As I also noted, Fox has been making a practice of attacking Turner of late.
I don’t know how much Turner-attacking Dean was aware of elsewhere on Fox but before long, she was back and she indirectly blasted Jackson.
DEAN: Just know this. When we track these storms, we usually have 5-7 days to prepare. We did for Katrina. And we knew it was going to be a hurricane and we knew it was going to make landfall in and around the Louisiana coastline, Mississippi.
With this storm, it went across the Yucatan, it fell apart, then went into the Bay of Campeche and exploded. And that’s when we knew – it was originally supposed to go into Mexico and it was Wednesday of last week when we were like, OK, this is going to make a right-hand turn and it’s going to go up towards the coast of Texas. We didn’t know it was going to be a Cat 4. The intensity is really hard to forecast. But we knew it was going to be an epic rainfall maker. So that’s when we started to alert people, “Hey, we need to watch this.” This was last Wednesday.
And then, then we started to get on TV and radio and start to warn people, “Hey, this is a hurricane, it’s going to make landfall, but don’t turn off your sets, the big story is going to be the epic flooding afterwards.”
So the challenge we had is, we didn’t have enough time, I fear, to warn people.
And I know that there’s the discussion about the mayor and whether the mayor did the right thing. There wasn’t enough time to evacuate. We would have had thousands of cars on the roadways trying to evacuate and when you think about [Hurricane] Rita in 2005? They had people die in their cars.
Faulkner, who did not defend the mayor when Regan and Jackson attacked him, now broke in to say, “107 people died during the evacuation.”
DEAN: Yes! That would have been an epic disaster and so I am in the corner of the mayor right now. They could not have evacuated 7 million people.
Nobody challenged her.
Watch Dean lay some truth on these propagandists below, from the August 29, 2017 Outnumbered.
(Image of Dean via screen grab.)
Encouragingly, I’ve heard many local GOP electees refuse (or refrain) to take the bait on this one during interviews on CNN. While couple of CNN hosts seem desperate to find something to wage outrage on most of the journalists are not taking that bait. A blond lady host in particular is pleading for stories that can get people’s blood boiling against anybody on anything. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit to see her on Fox in the near future.
PS: The Murdochs have decided to close FOX in the UK, because the channel is not drawing the audiences. Europeans haven’t forgotten what facism looks like.