In Storm Reports, Newcasters Exude Bravado-High Chance of Blowhards

[tannybogus]

Is it really a hurricane, or even just a "tropical depression," unless a TV reporter in a hooded windbreaker is flopping around in the wind and rain like a landed flounder?

Is it really a weather story at all unless the TV people can go outside in the storm and, while risking bodily injury, warn viewers that they shouldn't go outside in the storm and risk bodily injury?

If so, Hurricane Gustav was a real storm: All of the cliches and hyper-theatrical tropes of TV hurricane coverage were at Category 5 yesterday.

TV correspondents bellowing while taking facefuls of driving rain? Got it. Reporters hunched and squinting in the teeth of hurricane-force winds? Got that, too. Reporters dressed in the standard uniform of the intrepid weather correspondent -- colorful-but-flimsy network-logo jacket and ball cap -- to dramatize the effects of the driving rain and hurricane-force winds? Oh, yeah, got that, too.

It's not enough to report on a storm by showing TV viewers its impact. Dramatic as it is, the standard B-roll footage of pounding surf, wind-whipped palm trees and mangled power lines serves as a mere palate-cleanser. On storm stories, TV reporters are required to interact with the weather and become, potentially, human sacrifices to it.

This makes weather reporting different than every other kind of breaking TV news story. No one covers a house fire by rushing into the burning building, or reports on a war by doing stand-ups in the middle of a tank battle.

With the weather, however, participation is mandatory.

During yesterday's coverage, for example, CNN's Rob Marciano was nearly blown off a New Orleans rooftop as he pointed out the "whitetops" in the surging Mississippi River. His colleague Don Lemon was at street level, in what appeared to be a big open parking lot, warning viewers that wind-borne debris "can really shear through you." Another CNN correspondent, Brian Todd, hit the jackpot: He had to hang on to a pole while doing his report from Baton Rouge.

Everyone seemed to have the must-have production element: the disembodied hand of a TV camera person wiping the rain-spattered lens in the middle of the correspondent's report.

Poor Jeff Ranieri of MSNBC. All he had to illustrate his contention that "no one was spared the brunt of Gustav's force" yesterday afternoon was a battered billboard and a few broken branches on a half-dry New Orleans street.

(Carl Hiaasen, the Miami Herald columnist and satiric novelist, once pointed out that fallen-tree footage is essential to TV hurricane coverage. The most-sought-after video, he wrote, is "in order of ratings: 1. Big tree on strip mall. 2. Big tree on house. 3. Big tree on car. 4. Small tree on car. 5. Assorted shrubbery on car.")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/01/AR2008090102740_pf.html

They left out Contessa!!:cry:

[islandmkl]

1. note to Contessa:

wonder why they made you do such nasty, dangerous work??

want to avoid having to work at the 'big blows'??

do a little blowing of your own, so to speak...