Storm Warnings

We’re approaching the height of the end-of-summer storm season (we’re into the middle letters of the alphabet) and the news media – especially the TV news media – is in full-bore batten-down-the-hatches, run-for-your-lives, we’re-all-gonna-die fear mode. Last week it was Hurricane Irene, a category 1 hurricane that did significant damage along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina all the way up to Maine, though it wasn’t half as bad as warned and predicted (but much worse in Vermont after the not-predicted or not-hyped flooding after the downgrade from hurricane to tropical storm). This week it’s tropical storm Lee, bearing down on Louisiana with a forecasted 10”-20” of rain over the next 3-4 days (but no real threat beyond local flooding). And then “lurking” out in the Atlantic is hurricane Katia, which looks like it’s going to stay out over the ocean, but you just don’t know, do you?

The purpose of TV news is to entice eyeballs and ears to sell to advertisers, and a sure-fire way to do that is to scare the bejesus out of viewers into thinking their lives are just about to end in some massive tempest of apocalyptic proportion – it keeps us glued.

But the media are toeing a very thin line. If they don’t hype the danger of some impending storm (can anyone say Katrina?), they’re condemned for ignoring the threat that caused the suffering and death of people. But if they overdo their warnings, and the storm doesn’t materialize or veers off beyond harm’s way, they’re condemned for over-hyping the threat. It’s not a decision I’d care to make. But it does seem to be one that if you’re going to err, it’s best to err on the side of over-hyping: You don’t die if you escape a storm that doesn’t live up to the threat. You might well die if you hang around not thinking it’s going to be all that bad.

And that’s the media’s conundrum – if they downplay a storm’s threat, they run the risk of being accused (properly) of not warning the public, but if they overplay a storm’s threat, they’re accused of hyping the danger and (unduly) panicking the public. And then there’s the “cry wolf” syndrome: If you keep warning of danger that never comes, no one’s going to heed the warning when the threat’s real. Of course, given the option, the media are going to hype the danger – it just keeps the eyeballs glued. But if it’s erring, it’s erring on the side of safety. I can go with that.

That said, once the storm has passed, the media could return to a more reportage mode: This is what happened, and this is the way things are now. But following these storms, the media drumbeat of disaster keeps its rhythm steady. They search as search they can for the worst effects of the storm, even if the worst is a few inches of flooding in an unoccupied intersection or an empty boardwalk. One correspondent last week said she was reporting from onsite in a diminished area of the storm and was told by her producer in the studio to find a better shot because another channel had “more wind on camera” – that is, find something more visually dramatic. Another reporter I saw was standing in her waders (they all now seem to wear waders while standing in the rising flood waters, warning us not to venture into the rising flood waters), just up to her knees, saying in all earnestness that the water must be “three to three-and-a-half feet” – “Yes,” I thought, “if you happen to be about ten feet tall.” It seems that because they’ve predicted and warned that this could be a really big if not catastrophic storm that they have to find what they can that is (at least somewhat) big and catastrophic to validate their predictions and warnings.