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Last month, a clip of John Morales, a veteran broadcast meteorologist on NBC6 in Miami, went viral. The clip opened in 2019—showing Morales calmly and confidently telling frightened viewers that Hurricane Dorian, a devastating storm that had just battered the Bahamas, would turn before hitting Florida—before cutting back to the present day. “I am here to tell you that I’m not sure I can do that this year,” Morales said with a grimace, referring not to a new storm but to his level of confidence in hurricane forecasts generally. The reason: “the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science” underway within the Trump administration, which have led, among other things, to significant understaffing within National Weather Service offices and a drop in the release of weather balloons. “What we’re starting to see is that the quality of the forecasts is becoming degraded,” Morales said. When it comes to future hurricanes, “we may be flying blind.” Last week, Morales was back on air with an update, warning that “data-loss worries” had only intensified since his viral moment, and referring to a new Trump budget proposal that would gut various research offices across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which houses the NWS). “I’d prefer to be talking about meteorology,” Morales said, but “we have to cover” the cuts.

Not long after Morales’s second warning, heavy rain deluged parts of central Texas, leading to flash flooding. As of this morning, more than eighty people were confirmed to have been killed, and dozens more were still missing. The victims included more than two dozen young girls and counselors who had been taking part in a Christian summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, northwest of San Antonio. Over the weekend, CNN’s Pamela Brown reported from the camp, which she herself had visited as a child. “The Guadalupe River was a source of so much joy and fun,” she said, recounting memories of jumping into the water and hunting for dinosaur fossils. “We loved it here. And to think that this same river was the source of so much heartache, and terror, and devastation, I just can’t wrap my head around it.”

The flooding was not caused by a hurricane, but, echoing Morales’s prior warnings, questions were swiftly raised as to whether diminished forecasting capabilities, and cuts to NOAA more broadly, had exacerbated the tragedy. Some local officials seemed to point the finger at the NWS, stating that the scale of the rainfall had exceeded all forecasts and caught them off guard. Then, on Saturday, the New York Times reported that several “crucial positions” at local NWS offices are currently unfilled, potentially hampering communication between forecasters and emergency-management officials on the ground. The “warning coordination meteorologist” in the NWS’s San Antonio office, for example, left his job in April, after taking a retirement package that the administration has used as a scythe for the federal workforce.

The administration has hit back at such suggestions: asked by a reporter if meteorologists should now be rehired, Trump himself rejected the idea, claiming that even “very talented people” had failed to see the devastation coming; a White House spokesperson, meanwhile, accused critics of politicizing a tragedy and called their arguments “shameful and disgusting.” These denials, of course, were to be expected. But administration officials weren’t the only ones to defend the NWS—numerous independent meteorologists did so, too, noting that the agency did issue flood warnings as early as Thursday afternoon, and suggesting that local businesses and officials didn’t do enough to heed them. (While text alerts were sent to people’s phones, many of these came in the middle of the night; an official in Kerr County said over the weekend that it once considered installing siren-based or similar systems but rejected the idea because “the public reeled at the cost.”) “In this particular case, we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA and the NWS played any role at all in this event,” Matt Lanza, a Texas-based meteorologist, wrote in a widely shared Substack post on Saturday. “Anyone using this event to claim that is being dishonest.” Morales made a similar point on X. He also noted that while weather balloons in various parts of the country have been affected by Trump’s cuts, launches out of Del Rio, Texas, apparently “haven’t skipped a beat,” and played a crucial role in the flood warnings. (It appears, per Morales, that launches there are automated.)

This is not to say, however, that such voices declared that there was nothing to see here. In his Substack post, Lanza suggested that critics of Trump’s cuts can view the flooding “as a symbol of the value NOAA and NWS bring to society, understanding that as horrific as this is, yes, it could always have been even worse”; in a follow-up post yesterday, Lanza noted that the NWS office in San Antonio is relatively well-staffed compared to others, and that the absence of a warning coordination meteorologist likely didn’t have much impact this time because that role has more of a long-term focus—but that the absence will likely be felt if the position isn’t filled soon. Citing the Times’ reporting, Morales suggested that staffing shortages may have had an impact on coordination as the flooding hit, but also stressed the longer-term picture: “The relationship between emergency managers, media & NWS is cultivated over years,” he wrote, describing it as “a 3-legged stool that can age well as long as it’s maintained with good comms & practice.” The “media” leg of the stool, of course, matters hugely, not only in relaying official warnings to residents in a timely way when disaster strikes, but in the day-to-day business of making and communicating forecasts whatever the weather. Whatever happened in this specific instance, it’s fair to say that Trumpian cuts pose a generalized threat to this role. Public media stations, especially in rural areas, have warned that Trump’s push to strip that ecosystem of its federal funding won’t just lead to less news reporting, but could damage the infrastructure used to send emergency broadcast messages in areas with poor internet. And as Poynter’s Angela Fu reported earlier this year, broadcast meteorologists are highly reliant on NOAA and the NWS for the data they cite on air—and were sounding the alarm about cuts long before Morales’s recent viral moment.

To the extent that forecasts did fail to predict the level of rain in Texas, that’s partly because the discipline is not omniscient—as one meteorologist noted to Wired, it’s impossible to say with certainty how much rain will fall out of a storm, and precisely where. Louis W. Uccellini, a former director of the NWS, suggested to the Times that climate change is exacerbating that problem, by making extreme-rainfall events more frequent and more intense. Since the flooding in Texas, numerous news stories have centered, or at least mentioned, this crucial climate context, though in other coverage, the connection has not been made—part of a long-standing pattern in coverage of extreme weather, as I’ve often explored in this newsletter over the years. (Just last week, an analysis by Evlondo Cooper, of Media Matters for America, found that only 4 percent of national TV segments on the recent “heat dome” over much of the US mentioned climate change.) It is, of course, very hard to definitively attribute an unfolding weather event to climate change in isolation. (Flooding is such a risk in the affected part of Texas that the area is known as “Flash Flood Alley.”) But context matters, and the broader pattern is at this point unignorable. A similar logic could, perhaps, be applied to the questions the floods have raised about Trump’s cuts, which are part of the bigger-picture story here, even if the specifics of that intersection are complicated and still coming into full view, and should thus be covered with due care and nuance. 

The cuts to NOAA and the NWS are themselves part of the larger climate story, of course. In my seven or so years writing this newsletter, I’ve observed, at a high global level, improvements in the urgency with which that story has been told. But those gains have clearly tailed off recently, especially in the US. As Bill McKibben wrote for CJR in November, the climate story was all but missing from coverage of last year’s presidential election—in both its terrifying facets (a rapid intensification of temperature rises) and its more hopeful ones (leaps forward in solar energy, for example)—when it really ought to have been central to framing the choice that election offered. Since Trump returned to office, that lack of visibility has mostly continued, at least at the highest levels of the news cycle, even as Trump has taken a blowtorch to federal climate science. (Just last week, an official website dedicated to assessments of climate change in the US went dark.) Also last week, of course, Republicans passed, and Trump signed, a mega-bill that—among many, many other things—will roll back clean-energy incentives and, in all likelihood, have a terrible climate impact. As the Times columnist Ezra Klein observed recently, the growing tendency—in both parties—toward packing sweeping policy goals into a single piece of legislation can make them too big to talk about; if the climate impact of the bill wasn’t covered centrally enough, in my view, then that’s at least in part because its many other impacts—not least on healthcare provision—merited central coverage as well. The difference under Trump, as Klein also noted, is that the bill as a whole hasn’t even been the main political story of recent weeks, at least until it got closer to passage—a problem downstream, again, of all the other urgent stories jostling for our attention. Trump’s propensity to “flood the zone” and overwhelm his opponents and the press is well-established at this point. But rarely has the metaphor felt so enragingly, tragically literal.

I last wrote about Morales in the weeks before last year’s election, when he also went viral, this time for growing visibly emotional on air as he covered the progression of Hurricane Milton toward Florida. Morales told reporters afterward that his demeanor reflected, in part, his frustration that the world hasn’t done more to curb climate change—part of a deliberate shift in his approach, he suggested, to become more alarmist about the threat, critics be damned. As Milton and another hurricane, Helene, hit the US, some meteorologists reported receiving death threats amid a wave of outlandish conspiracy theories about the storms’ origins, putting at least one social media user in mind of a moment in The Simpsons when a direct hit from a comet is averted and Moe the bartender says, “Let’s go burn down the observatory so this’ll never happen again!” The observatory, it appears, functioned this time, but the flames are lapping at the gates. As part of his recent warning about the accuracy of hurricane forecasting, Morales noted right-wing plans to dismember NOAA, on the grounds that it is a “climate scaremonger.” “But, trust me,” Morales wrote. “As far as alarming happenings brought on by the changing climate, you haven’t seen anything yet!”

Other Notable Stories
By Jem Bartholomew

• On Friday, CJR reported on the fallout after the New York Times published an article about a 2009 college application by Zohran Mamdani, the progressive New York City mayoral candidate. Mamdani, who checked boxes that he was both “Asian” and “Black or African American” while applying to Columbia University, dismissed the story, saying the application form couldn’t capture the complexity of his background. (Mamdani is of Indian descent, was born in Uganda, and lived in South Africa before moving to the US in childhood.) But it emerged that the story was based on hacked documents, obtained through an intermediary, who went by the social media moniker Crémieux. As The Guardian has reported, however, this is the alias of Jordan Lasker, a promoter of white supremacist views. In a now-deleted post on Bluesky, Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie said: “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi.”

• Last week saw Paramount, the parent company of CBS, agree to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump alleging that the network had deceptively edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The then–vice president appeared to give different answers to the same question in two versions aired by CBS last October, leading Trump to sue for $10 billion. The $16 million settlement, which will go to Trump’s future presidential library, does not include “a statement of apology or regret” from Paramount. But it’s another instance, The Guardian reports, of Trump waging war on the free press—and winning.

• The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) last week condemned three cases of journalists being detained. CPJ said it was “outraged” at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for not releasing Salvadoran journalist and livestreamer Mario Guevara, based in Atlanta, despite a federal immigration judge ordering his release on bail. CPJ also condemned the arrests of newspaper editor Faith Zaba in Zimbabwe, for “insulting the authority of the president,” and of journalist Muzahim Bajaber in Yemen, on unspecified charges. 

• In the UK, Wednesday saw the airing on Channel 4 of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, a documentary recounting how hospitals have been targeted and bombed in the Israeli assault on the coastal strip and revealing allegations of torture on Gazan doctors perpetrated by IDF forces. The film was initially planned to be broadcast by the BBC but was dropped, the public service broadcaster said, because the “material risked creating a perception of partiality.” Ben De Pear, the film’s producer, criticized the BBC on LinkedIn, saying he refused to sign a “double gagging clause” and that the decision was politically motivated.

• The past nine weeks have seen Australia gripped by the supreme court trial of Erin Patterson, who was found guilty on Monday of murdering three of her estranged husband’s relatives by serving them a lunch cooked with death cap mushrooms. The trial has been a magnet for true-crime style coverage. Patterson “showed no emotion but blinked rapidly as the verdicts were read,” the AP wrote. And this week Deadline reported that the murder story will next be turned into a TV drama for ABC, called Toxic. A producer said the show’s goal was “to reveal, not just sensationalize.”

• And in the world of sports reporting, Jonathan Liew writes for The Guardian about the strange inner logic of the press room at Wimbledon. It’s a media circus that brings together, he writes, pompous tennis pseuds, nerdy bloggers, vapid gossip columnists, and tabloid reporters seeking a snappy line. “Iga Swiatek gets seven questions in a row on strawberries. Amanda Anisimova gets asked whether her luggage has ever gone missing,” he writes, concluding that the sports press conference format generates “an anti-intimacy, a kind of transactional, mass-produced, lowest-common-denominator slop that fails to get the best out of anyone.” 

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