Windy Newscasters

I spent the weekend enjoying myself at Bubonicon, but every so often I’d check the news to see whether Hurricane Irene had destroyed the East Coast, as our bold media establishment had been predicting for days.

Of course the hurricane had been downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it made landfall in the Carolinas, and did only a modest amount of damage and produced only an insignificant death toll, which proved to be a catastrophe for the newscasters if not for the country.

Not that the newscasters didn’t do their best to pump up the volume during this non-event.  They were ready for an enormous disaster and they were going to get one if it killed them.  So there they were standing on beaches, getting pummeled by rain and winds, examining flotsam left high and dry by the surge, and (in one case) fleeing from floodwaters while screeching at the crew not to get the microphone cord in the water.

You could readily believe that the only people to behaved stupidly during the storm were news teams. Everyone else seemed responsible and cautious.

I recall one late-breaking headline to the effect that a tree had been blown down in Virginia.   (A tree fell down!  Horrors! Call the National Guard!)  The reporter examined the tree in some detail, and pointed out that when it fell (at 2am) it had landed on a parked car.

“Was anyone in the car injured?” asked the anchor hopefully.

No.  No one had been hurt.  You could hear the reporters’ frustration at the sight of no blood, no death, no significant mayhem.  No story.

While the dimwitted news teams strove to find drama amid the damp squib that was Irene,  they never mentioned the giant typhoon that’s about to crash into Taiwan.  For information on the Libyan rebellion I had to go to Al Jazeera, which (along with the Turkish Daily News) was my source for information on the ongoing Syrian insurrection.  The U.S. news somehow even managed to avoid mention of the death of al-Qaeda’s number two, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, victim of an American missile.

So far as I could tell, the television news was doing their best to manufacture a story, but were too inept to manage even that.  With this kind of effort, William Randolph Hearst could have got us a whole dang war!

He must be spinning in his grave.

UPDATE:  Looking at it from the perspective of a further 24 hours, it’s clear that the storm was more serious than initial coverage indicated, though considerably less than the apocalypse the media were hoping for.  Damage has run into billions, and the casualty lists are longer.  That things weren’t worse is down to the population, who by and large seemed to have taken the warnings seriously, took sensible precautions, and evacuated where possible.

That was the real story, and the broadcast media seem to have missed it.  While their asshat reporters posed bravely on windswept beaches and interviewed dead trees, the actual story was going on in shelters, FEMA offices, emergency planning meetings, in hospitals and ambulances, and in the homes and apartments of ordinary people.  None of that was dramatic or exciting enough for television news, though the print media (a day later) seems to have found the story.

I’m learning more from reading my friends’ blogs than I got from hours of watching CNN.  And the writing is better.