Were media fact checkers too quick to dismiss weather modification claim?

There's too much tendency to take government officials at their word

Let’s talk about the weather. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene made headlines this week by posting on social media that weather modification was to blame for the devastation of Hurricane Helene. The congresswoman went on to charge that the hurricane benefits Democrats in the upcoming presidential election, because the storm’s damage overwhelmingly affected Republican geographic strongholds.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

News media fact checkers were quick to jump in and declare Taylor Greene’s allegations false. PolitiFact, for example, gave the claim its “pants on fire” rating, saying, “there’s no proof that Hurricane Helene was formed through weather modification.”

PolitiFact went on to cite “experts” to debunk the claim, including a university professor and a government official who said the U.S. government’s experimentation in weather modification ended more than 40 years ago. This passage from the article is worth repeating here:

"NOAA confirms that there are no weather modification activities that could have resulted in Hurricane Helene. Hurricanes form on their own given the right conditions and that was the case with Helene," Monica Allen, director of public affairs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Research division, told PolitiFact. 

Allen cited Project Stormfury, a NOAA project in the 1960s that "involved seeding existing hurricanes." Attempted on four hurricanes, the project studied how seeding clouds with silver iodide could lead to a decrease in the hurricane’s strongest winds.

"This project ended in 1983 because it had, at best, mixed results, and there were concerns about unintended consequences," Allen said. "Since then, NOAA has done no weather modification."

Hugh Willoughby, a university professor who once lead NOAA’s hurricane research division, offered this explanation to PolitiFact:

"As far as I know, nobody in the U.S. is undertaking hurricane modification, or even has the capability."

But in 1947, there was significant concern that weather modification caused a hurricane that clipped Florida and was headed out to sea to suddenly turn back toward the mainland. The weather modification program was called Project Cirrus. As cited by PolitiFact:

The day after the hurricane exited the state and was projected to continue out to sea without affecting any more people, aircraft flew out and dumped dry ice into the hurricane’s clouds. The hurricane soon swerved west and gained strength. It made landfall in Georgia on Oct. 15, 1947, causing one death and millions in damage to Georgia and South Carolina.

The head of General Electric Research Laboratory believed the storm changed course because of the experiment, but the weather bureau chief at the time, Dr. Francis Reichelderfer, disagreed. Willoughby said the Project Stormfury investigators were "very cautious" after what happened with Project Cirrus, "even though it is unlikely that seeding had anything to do with the change in track."

This type of reporting is standard fair for media and their “fact checkers.” A typical news story takes a claim made by someone and debunks it using government sources or sources tangentially connected to government.

The problem with this is that government tends to lie about everything, and it doesn’t really matter which administration or political party is in charge of government at a given time. It is an ongoing truism. And the media generally provides cover for the coverup.

Up until 2020, my go-to example of this used to focus on the news accounts surrounding unemployment rates and inflation. The unemployment data reported regularly by the news media almost always uses the government’s preferred measurement of unemployment: the number of people drawing unemployment checks. But this excludes the number of people who have stopped collecting unemployment, have stopped looking for work, and remain unemployed or who are underemployed. The latest true unemployment rate is close to 8 percent. But the rate you hear from the media via government sources puts unemployment at about half of that.

But the ease of government lying and media complicity in it more pronounced four years ago with the coverage of Covid and the presidential election.

Beginning in March 2020, the media tended to discount anything that people said challenging the government narrative regarding masks, “social distancing,” and vaccinations. If what was said that didn’t come from a government source or some other anointed expert, it was cast aside as being subversive, potentially dangerous, and definitely untrue.

In November 2020, with President Trump challenging the results of the general election, the New York Times reported that it had contacted election officials in all 50 states to see if they saw evidence of voter fraud, as suggested by the Trump team. As one might expect, each state’s government officials confirmed that the election had no major issues. Why would they say otherwise?

Immediately after that story ran, reporters everywhere else began using the word “baseless” to describe Trump’s claims of election irregularity. The word “baseless” even emerged before any court filings by the Trump campaign in several contested states.

The Trump case is somewhat unique in that, in this case, one government official (Trump) was claiming election irregularity and other government officials (mostly secretaries of state and their election offices) were saying something else. Here, the media chose a side when they could have just as easily reported what each side had to say and leave it at that.

The lack of inquisitiveness among the media and a willingness to accept facts as certain institutions write them have created significant ongoing issues. And so, two years ago, as the economy was in an obvious tailspin, the Biden administration decided to monkey with the definition of a “recession” so as to convince people the economy wasn’t so bad. The media should have been screaming at such an obvious manipulation of data, but instead they just went with it. And politicians and bureaucrats have since used that as a blueprint to manipulate downward with the official version of what constitutes inflation, resulting in official inflation numbers being far less than what mere mortals encounter in the real world.

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It certainly is possible that the people at NOAA are no longer involved in any projects to tinker with the weather. It’s also possible that NOAA is lying, or that the official who was interviewed by PolitiFact doesn’t know what other aspects of the agency is secretly doing. And NOAA is just one government agency. It’s worth noting that previous weather modification attempts, including Project Cirrus, involved the U.S. military. Does the U.S. military have any weather modification work underway? Did anyone from the media bother to ask? If they had, would they have gotten a truthful answer?

And of course, the United States is just one country in the world. Do other countries have weather modification projects underway? The United Nations sure seems to think so.

None of this is to say that weather modification caused the destruction being witnessed in America’s southeast. We don’t know and perhaps may never be able to say definitively if people claiming this to be the case are correct. It is only to say that government officials have a tendency to lie, and the legacy media have a tendency to accept that lie, as has been well documented.

There’s a saying that’s been tossed around for decades that goes something like this: “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Maybe we add to that: Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially debunked by media fact checkers.