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Misleading Headline

"Zero Hurricanes Formed By Peak 2026 Season. A Former Climate Reporter Says That's Why You Haven't Heard About It."

Published by Daily Caller

View Original Article

Written by: Paris Apodaca

The record-quiet hurricane season was covered by AP, CBS, the Post and the Times, as the article admits

What's Actually Happening

The headline tells readers they "haven't heard about" the hurricane-free season because climate reporters suppress good news. The article's own body says: "several major news outlets have reported on the absence of hurricanes. The Associated Press, CBS News, The Washington Post and The New York Times have all covered the unusual lull in recent days."1 The season's numbers are real and the coverage exists.23 The headline's premise is contradicted by the story underneath it.

The weather facts in Paris Apodaca's piece for the Daily Caller hold up. As of mid-September, five tropical storms had formed in the Atlantic and none had reached hurricane strength.12 On September 12 the season set the record for the latest first hurricane in the satellite era, which dates to 1966.12 Accumulated cyclone energy, the standard measure of a season's overall activity, was at its lowest level since 1941.1 The cause is a strong El Niño, which increases wind shear over the tropical Atlantic and makes storm formation harder.23

The headline is about the media rather than the weather, and it rests on a claim from a former climate reporter, Lucy Biggers, that "this is why we rarely see events like this year's historically quiet eastern hurricane season covered widely by the news."1

"While Biggers argued the quiet season has received limited coverage, several major news outlets have reported on the absence of hurricanes. The Associated Press, CBS News, The Washington Post and The New York Times have all covered the unusual lull in recent days."1

The outlet checked its own premise, found it did not hold up, and ran the headline anyway. CBS News published "The Atlantic Ocean just broke a 60-year record for the longest stretch without a hurricane" on September 15.2 Newsweek ran a story on the approaching record on September 8 and updated it when the record fell.3 The Daily Caller's own body cites CBS News and The Weather Channel for its numbers.1

There is a legitimate debate about whether climate coverage overweights extreme events and underweights quiet ones. This headline asserts the conclusion as a fact ("that's why you haven't heard about it") while the reporting beneath it documents the opposite. A reader who trusts the headline learns two false things: that the season went unreported, and that a named group of journalists chose to hide it. The reader who keeps going learns neither is true, which is a strange thing for a headline to do to its own story.

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