Hurricane Coverage

The 24-hour national news stations were covering the Texas landfall of hurricane Dolly yesterday. The southern U.S. gets hit by hurricanes on a fairly regular basis, so I’m used to paying attention to the news reports on them — especially when I lived on the coast.

I’ve never been in a city while it was being hit by the eye of a hurricane, but I’ve been in a couple shortly after the drama: water, water, everywhere…, and debris. I’ve been in a city while it was being blown and washed by the middle-range bands of a hurricane, and I’ve seen the outer bands many times.

The thing that makes me laugh about news coverage of hurricanes is the “we’re reporters; we’re immune,” attitudes. The anchors and weather folks in the studio spend five minutes explaining the danger of wind and water and flying/floating debris, and urging folks living in the targeted areas to leave the city or seek secure shelter. Then the next 55 minutes of coverage goes from reporter to reporter actually standing out in the storm.

A couple of years ago a reporter, bracing herself from the wind, against a building, saw a “civilian” struggling across the street. The reporter went on a rant about how foolish the civilian was for being out in the storm like that. It never occurred to her or the folks back in the studio that she was an idiot for chastising someone else for doing what she was stupid for doing.

Yesterday, on CNN, the anchors gave the standard spiel about how everyone should have left the Texas coast or sought safe shelter. They showed images of the harbor, before the storm, and showed all the boats they were predicting would be strewn everywhere or sunk. Then they went live, over the phone, to a reporter in one of those boats. The reporter went into great detail about how dangerous it was, with the wind and waves threatening to capsize the boat, push the boat into other boats, into pylons, or into the docks.

You know, if a reporter is “brave” (read: “stupid”) enough to stand out in the wind and debris, someone in the news organization should tell them to not compound their obvious idiocy by telling everyone else they shouldn’t be out in the storm.

If the news agencies really want other people to be safe during events like that, they should show the potential results of being an idiot in a hurricane. Whack a reporter down with a stop sign, then push them into a raging street flood and film them washing away into a storm drain. That will illustrate the point very well.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com