Opinion: TV News and Hurricanes Are a Tale of Jekyll and Hyde
How Hurricane Coverage Brings Out the Best and Worst of TV News
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Turn on your TV sets this week and you’ll almost certainly be bombarded by an endless loop of so-called “weather porn”: One “daring” reporter after another getting soaked while buffeted by the powerful winds of Hurricane Ian, and meteorologists struggling to stay upright on beaches as they’re pounded by waves and storm surge.
Their “courageous” confronting of Mother Nature is also often just plain stupid.
The problem is that for TV news, as Michael Schneider once wrote, “violent storms are nature’s car chases.” People can’t take their eyes off them, and they’re great for ratings. But sensationalistic reporting does very little good in the face of a major storm, and it could do serious harm.
As I write, Florida is confronting a storm that could have devastating consequences for millions of people.
Thirty years ago, I saw firsthand what a major hurricane can do to a densely populated area. While Ian may not pack quite the wind punch delivered by 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, a category 5 storm, its winds, storm surge, flooding, and rains will affect a larger part of the state.
Devastation wrought by Hurricane Andrew in South Florida in an aerial photograph taken on August 25, 1992, the day after it made landfall near Homestead, Fla. (Steve Starr/Getty Images)
To give you some perspective, I flew by helicopter in December of 1992, almost four months after Andrew hit, from downtown Miami to Homestead, Fla. (one of the locations where the storm made landfall), to cover a story about the travails of people who were still living in tents.
Once we reached the Kendall area of Miami, the magnitude of the destruction took my breath away. Every single home left standing had roof damage, and that continued all the way to our destination, more than 25 miles to the south. The map below will give you a better sense of the incredible breadth of the devastation, something I’m afraid we will see again in Ian’s aftermath.
This screen grab of a Google Map shows the large area where I witnessed from a helicopter the miles upon miles of tremendous devastation caused by Hurricane Andrew. From the upper center of the map, where you see the number “1,” all the way to Homestead in the lower right, almost all roofs remained damaged more than three months later.
The Role of Reporters
A fine line exists between properly conveying the real danger a storm poses and instead sending a message that the threat can’t possibly be that great if a reporter is “safe” outside.
Experienced TV journalists will tell you that they know how to protect themselves, and that it’s important to show viewers how dangerous conditions are. They’ll even argue that they’re providing a public service by showing people what not to do.
I was one of those reporters, having chased multiple hurricanes throughout my career. My job was to go straight toward the storms, while telling people they should run away.
The story of how I covered one hurricane might provide an interesting illustration of the process.
In September of 1998, Hurricane Georges threatened South Florida. Not knowing exactly where the storm would make landfall, ABC News staged correspondents and crews in different locations, sending me from New York City to Miami. The storm stayed south, hitting Key West on September 25 with 105 mph winds. It then headed northwest into the Gulf of Mexico.
ABC needed to reposition us, so we were sent to Mobile, Alabama, the area where Georges was next expected to affect the U.S. The news desk had to charter a Learjet to get us there because the storm had made a mess out of commercial air travel.
Then we began a waiting game as Georges churned its way for days through the Gulf. We had so much time to kill that my producer and I even played golf that weekend.
Over the following two days, the hurricane’s track shifted west. Early on Sunday, Sept. 27, we drove to Slidell, Louisiana, northeast of New Orleans, where Georges was now expected to hit. Everything was closing, so we stopped at a WalMart to get food and supplies, then checked into a motel. One of my clearest memories is cooking steaks in the open-air hallway outside our rooms using a cheap, battery-powered grill we’d purchased. When covering a hurricane or living through one, you never know when you’ll next have a hot meal.
We never got to spend the night. The storm jogged eastward, so we rushed to Gulfport, Miss., where we spent the night. The next morning, we just missed the eye, which made landfall about 15 miles east of us, in the Ocean Springs-Biloxi area, at 6:00 a.m. CDT.
Two residents of Gulfport, Miss, walk away from a severely damaged gas station following the high winds of Hurricane Georges on Sept. 28, 1998. (Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)
I was on the air soon thereafter, struggling to stand in a flooded parking lot, somewhat protected by a hotel’s structure, while my crew was stationed under the hotel’s carport.
We knew how to protect ourselves and reduce the risk, but nothing will save you if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One way hurricane-force winds can be lethal is that they can turn even small bits of debris into deadly projectiles.
I remember questioning my own sanity as we saw chunks of a roof torn off and a street sign, turned into a missile, fly by.
My old friend, CNN’s Kyung Lah, narrowly missed being seriously injured by a street sign herself while covering 2017’s Hurricane Irma in Miami.
She’s just one of many reporters have had a near misses when it comes to dangerous airborne objects. The cover photo to this column shows The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore getting hit by a large tree branch just today in Fort Myers as Ian neared landfall. Cantore also almost got impaled by a high-velocity 2x4 while covering Hurricane Michael on Oct. 10, 2018. His colleague Mike Seidel barely avoided serious injury from a lawn chair while reporting live on Hurricane Nate in Biloxi on Oct. 8, 2017.
At a time when I was not working as an on-air journalist, my family and I left our house in advance of Irma because we were in an evacuation zone. When I returned, I found two metal bars knocked off a gate and another badly bent (see the picture below). Whatever flying object caused the damage was nowhere to be found. Imagine if that debris had hit a person’s head.
Hurricanes pose all sorts of deadly threats: winds, storm surge, downed powerlines, even displaced wildlife. In Georges’ aftermath, I walked through a flooded neighborhood telling viewers about the threat from alligators and snakes, as if I were somehow invulnerable.
Others haven’t been lucky enough to avoid injury. British journalist Alan Butterfield was severely hurt when he was electrocuted while covering Hurricane Harvey in Houston on Aug. 28, 2017. A TV News anchor and his cameraman were killed when a tree fell on their vehicle as they reported on Subtropical Storm Alberto in North Carolina on May 28, 2018.
What’s the Alternative?
The reality is that I don’t expect anything will change. Reporters who brave the dangers and deliver dramatic live reporting on violent storms help their careers, and their bosses have little incentive to stop them, given the ratings generated by the coverage.
Sometimes, they really do perform a significant public service and save lives by convincing viewers to follow evacuation orders.
As a young reporter, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather was the first person to broadcast live radar of a hurricane from a National Weather Service office. He did it as Hurricane Carla approached Galveston Island and Houston in September of 1961. He also reported from the rough surf of the Galveston seawall, in what became a model for the hurricane reporting we see today. Rather's broadcasts are believed to have helped convince as many as 350,000 people to evacuate the Galveston area. It was then considered the largest weather evacuation in U.S. history. Carla, the most intense hurricane to ever hit Texas, was far stronger than the 1900 Galveston hurricane that killed thousands and is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. But Carla only killed 46 people, so Rather’s reporting undoubtedly saved many.
The hope, of course, is that reporting on Ian made Floridians in the hurricane’s path heed warnings and head to safety.
For that to happen now and in the future, reporters have stop being their own and the broader news media’s worst enemies. An infamous report on NBC’s “Today” showed a correspondent reporting live from a canoe on a flooded street in Wayne, N.J., in 2005. In the middle of her report, two men comfortably walked by through what was little more than ankle-deep water.
Another unintentionally hilarious video shows the Weather Channel’s Seidel struggling to stand during 2018’s Hurricane Florence. The problem is that you then see two men quite calmly and comfortably walking behind him.
And there’s Today’s Al Roker, who proved that even when protected from the worst of the winds by a building, you never know what’s going to happen. Despite having a colleague holding onto him on the balcony of a hotel, he still ended up doing a faceplant during 2005’s Hurricane Wilma.
In conclusion, despite the excesses from some reporters and the often inane hyperbole and melodrama, sober hurricane reporting provides an important public service. Journalists just need to be careful and avoid being the storm equivalent of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”
Cover photo: This screen grab from The Weather Channel shows veteran meteorologist Jim Cantore getting knocked over by a large tree branch on Sept. 28, 2022, in Fort Myers as Hurricane Ian neared landfall.
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