LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Media bashes media, its about time
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Marc Peyser
Newsweek
Updated: 8:37 a.m. ET Oct. 28, 2005
Oct. 28, 2005 - The sky is falling! The sky is falling! But you’ve noticed that. Even if you live in the desert, there’s probably a storm brewing in your living room—courtesy of the TV news. This has been an unusually active hurricane season, so it’s not surprising that the storm coverage is coming down in buckets. The problem isn’t the number of stories—well, it kind of is. But what’s really embarrassing is the shallow, repetitive presentation, even by TV news standards.
In this alpha of hurricane seasons, we all know the drill by now. The minute that meteorologists pinpoint a storm’s landfall in the United States, reporters turn up on your television standing on a lovely, sunny beach warning about Armageddon. “This is the calm before the storm!” they proclaim—and I dare you to find an exception—while trying to stave off a sunburn. The rest proceeds like clockwork. Within 24 hours, the sky will turn dark, the waves will grow and the rain will come. Like the stripes on a zebra, every storm is unique. So why is it that all the storm coverage looks the same? In every storm your intrepid reporter will be standing outside in some nifty-looking rain slicker getting pelted in the face and knocked around in the wind. They’ll probably offer a few insights—comparing how wet they are right now versus 11 minutes ago or, if they’re really good, telling you what direction the wind is coming from. But no matter how long you watch, you’ll really only learn one thing. It rains during a hurricane. A lot—though not enough to obscure the network’s logo on the rain slicker.
The tedium of storm coverage reached its low-water mark during this week’s coverage of Hurricane Wilma. Because Hurricane Katrina turned into truly a catastrophic event, the TV storm chasers were out in huge numbers, even though this was a much less deadly storm. At one point, CNN had Miles O’Brien and Anderson Cooper on screen at the same time for no other reason than to show us the Storm Tango—two star reporters falling down in unison. (Were they actually together? It was hard to tell, thanks to another hallmark of storm coverage: “technical difficulties.”) Whatever the case, when they had both almost landed on their feet again, we arrived at another staple of TV storm stories: the voice of the anchor, ensconced in his warm, dry studio, pleading with the reporters to get inside. And so they did.
But not soon enough to save Cooper. Just weeks earlier, he’d become an overnight sensation with his teary, emotional coverage of Katrina. Cooper had, miraculously, cut through the cant and found the anger and sadness that many New Orleans hurricane victims felt, especially those who were so poor that the government seemed not to care about them. So of course Cooper turned up for the next big storm. But instead of finding the human pulse behind it, he stood outside like the rest of the schmoes telling us it was raining. It was a pity to see Cooper squander his reputation as a thoughtful TV reporter and turn himself into yet another hurricane whore.
But that wasn’t the silliest storm coverage. “Today” turned its big gun loose on Wilma: weatherman Al Roker. “Today” has already earned a reputation for the biggest hurricane disaster on TV, thanks to Michelle Kosinski, a reporter who covered one poststorm flood from a canoe. The water was just too deep, she said, to do it any other way. Unfortunately for Kosinski’s reputation, while she was on the air, two men walked into the frame in front of her—yes, walking, because the water was only about ankle deep. Ooops.
But back to Wilma: Roker was standing on the balcony of a building somewhere in Florida when he started teetering in the wind. Cut to Roker falling down—on top of “Mike, the camera guy,” who was holding Roker’s ankles. Jon Stewart called Mike a “human sandbag.” Tee-hee: aren’t hurricanes funny! And you know what came next: Katie and Matt, high and dry and back in New York, begging Roker and Mike to go inside. Which of course they did. Most hurricane reporters aren’t exactly war reporters, so once they’ve proved how hard the wind is blowing, they pack it in. (The exception: the intrepid men and women of the Weather Channel, though I do wonder why they have to assign full-fledged meteorologists to stand out in the rain. Wouldn’t they be of more service doing some actual forecasting?)
And have you noticed where most of these reporters were “reporting” from? More often than not, it’s either just outside their station’s office building or on the patio of some hotel. There’s nothing seriously wrong with reporting from your hotel, but it’s awfully lazy. That’s understandable—it’s not easy to get around town in a hurricane. But why don’t reporters station themselves someplace different, such as a place where actual people (other than the reporter) are trying to survive? There would be plenty of stories to tell inside a shelter, or in an apartment building were residents were nervously watching to see if their windows are going to get blown out. There are plenty of human-interest stories told after the storm. Why not find them in the teeth of the tragedy?
But real people and real reporting are obviously not the point. This is news for show, not for information. News, and especially TV news, has long been going the way of infotainment, and hurricane coverage has become a way to sex-up the broadcast with Hollywood-like special effects. In a way, the coverage isn’t unlike all those high-speed chases you see on local broadcasts all the time—sure they’re fast, but they run out of road pretty quickly.
That’s not to say that hurricanes don’t deserve coverage. Of course they do. But they also deserve thoughtful, in-depth reporting that tells viewers something they haven’t seen in the last dozen hurricanes. That is, after all, why we call it “news.”
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
- Home
- Forum
-
Fishing Reports
- Alabama Fishing Reports
- Alaska Fishing Reports
- Canada Fishing Reports
- California Fishing Reports
- Central America Fishing Reports
- Connecticut Fishing Reports
- Delaware Fishing Reports
- Florida Fishing Reports
- Georgia Fishing Reports
- Hawaii Fishing Reports
- Louisiana Fishing Reports
- Maine Fishing Reports
- Maryland Fishing Reports
- Massachusetts Fishing Reports
- Mississippi Fishing Reports
- Mexico Fishing Reports
- New Hampshire Fishing Reports
- New Jersey Fishing Reports
- New York Fishing Reports
- North Carolina Fishing Reports
- Oregon Fishing Reports
- Rhode Island Fishing Reports
- South Carolina Fishing Reports
- Texas Fishing Reports
- Virginia Fishing Reports
- Washington Fishing Reports
- Directory
- Media
- Resources
- Contact Us
- Advertising
- What's New?
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by FISHINBUDDY
Gas comp increases
Well geneous it was up because you were telling us the supply was going to be low and refining slow. Next they will raise the prices because of the cost to fix the damage from the storms. 
