by WorldTribune Staff, January 14, 2025 Real World News
During MSNBC's 2024 election night coverage, Joy Reed boasted: "Queen Latifah never endorses anyone. She came out and endorsed her (Kamala Harris). She had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the Taylor Swift — the Swifties, she had the B-hive."
Those endorsements amounted to diddly-squat as Harris was decimated by President-elect Donald Trump's MAGA movement.
Yet major media still can't stop its obsession with celebrity.
That is being proven on a daily basis in coverage of the Los Angeles wildfires.
"Aerial shots of burnt-out mansions and stories of narrowly evacuated movie stars dominate headlines," Hollie McKay noted in a Jan. 12 Substack.com op-ed.
"Meanwhile, thousands of ordinary Angelenos—teachers, nurses, retirees—lose everything, their suffering relegated to the background."
The imbalance in coverage, McKay added, "erodes our empathy. By focusing disproportionately on those with the means to pull their lives and homes together again, we risk trivializing the plight of those who cannot. A young family in Sylmar or a retired couple in Woodland Hills may not have star power, but their losses are no less devastating."
McKay continued: "For most of the wealthy, insurance offers a financial safety net, albeit an imperfect one. But for the working class, it’s a different story. California’s escalating wildfire risk has led to skyrocketing premiums and policy cancellations. In some high-risk zones, insurance is either prohibitively expensive or outright unavailable. State regulations aimed at mitigating this crisis, such as the California FAIR Plan, often provide only minimal coverage. For struggling homeowners, rebuilding is either financially ruinous or entirely impossible.
"Consider a single mother who loses her modest home in a fire. Without adequate insurance, she’s left to navigate a labyrinth of state aid programs that are slow-moving and insufficient. Her precarious financial situation is compounded by the loss of belongings, irreplaceable family heirlooms, and the very stability her children rely on."
For Californians, wildfires have become yearly concerns as hurricanes are to Floridians, but the fires in Los Angeles in the first month of 2025 "have cut deeper than ever," McKay wrote. "As the hillsides of Malibu to the Pacific Palisades to Hollywood and Encino burn, media coverage predictably turns its lens to the sprawling estates of the rich and famous. This framing, though captivating, threatens to overshadow the real story: the untold suffering of ordinary people who lack the resources to rebuild, relocate, or even endure."
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