Hurricane Bill Threatens to Wreak Havoc, Headlines

It’s been a rainy summer in New York, but so far there’s been a drought of news this August. Aside from the health care debate and the bad behavior it’s spawned, it’s slim pickins. According to The Guardian, even “silly stories” about sharks, dubious surveys, and animals with prosthetic limbs have been in short supply.

What can the media do when there’s either not much to talk about or nobody’s paying attention? Get people scared about the weather!Hurricane Bill, which is currently off the coast of Bermuda, is the first major hurricane of the season. It was recently upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane, with maximum wind speeds of about 135 miles per hour. This all sounds like scary stuff. In 2004, Hurricane Charley, another Category 4 hurricane, dealt $18.9 billion worth of damage in today’s dollars and caused President George W. Bush to declare Florida a federal disaster area. And after Hurricane Katrina (which was a more powerful Category 5), Americans are aware of the massive devastation that hurricanes can wreak.

The buried lede here is that most experts seem to be in agreement that Hurricane Bill won’t impact the East Coast in any significant way. According to Reuters, “Bill was not expected to hit the United States but high winds and surf could reach Cape Cod in Massachusetts and coastal Maine.” “No computer models showed Bill posing a major danger to the United States,” wrote CNN.  “The East Coast is lucky,” a meteorologist told Bloomberg.

Hurricanes are deadly, damaging forces of nature; weather is notoriously unpredictable, and it is the media’s job to keep people appraised of high-impact, low-probability events.  But as with Swine Flu H1N1, the profit motive becomes an ulterior motive when you’re in the business of selling eyeballs and your warnings seem to be the only things those eyeballs will watch or read. Overblown sensationalism ensues.

Countdown: how long before Rush Limbaugh blames the Hurricane Bill frenzy on President Obama, somehow?