Sending Reporters Into Hurricanes Is Dumb and Reckless
There’s a scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where famed journalist Hunter Thompson is covering an off-road race in the desert while riding around in a jeep. Having no real interest in doing so, he tells the driver to take him back to the starting line.
“No, no, no, no, no! We have to go on!” says an enthusiastic photographer accompanying him. “We need Total Coverage!”
Thompson abandons the vehicle to walk back as the photographer can be heard yelling to the driver, “Drive into the dust!”
Hurricane Ian isn’t bringing dust to Florida right now, but it’s bringing tons of rain and wind gusts of up to 130 miles an hour.
This of course means that various national and local TV news stations have collectively sent hundreds of reporters to cover the storm.
Total Coverage!
Now, I don’t know this for sure, but I kind of do, which is, the stronger a storm is anticipated to be, the more TV reporters will cover it at the scene because there will likely be more destruction. And destruction, sadly, is great for ratings.
That certainly seems intuitively true, but at the same time, it makes little practical sense – at least in the age of social media.
In the pre-social media, pre-phone camera era, TV reporters arguably had a role to play by standing in the middle of tempests while it rained sideways and wind gusts blew outdoor cats and Mazdas all over the place.
But nowadays everyone has a smartphone and a social media account. Crazy footage of a hurricane doing hurricane things is actually best left crowd-sourced. After all, there are millions of “reporters” in Florida right now and they have been posting the wildest stuff imaginable.
Meanwhile, over on the Weather Channel on Wednesday, Jim Cantore got taken out by a flying tree branch. He was fine, but he easily could have been not fine. So, instead of merely watching the now-viral clip and gasping, “Yikes,” that could’ve gone very differently and we would’ve had another reaction, i.e., “Is he dead?”
Jim Cantore literally hit by a flying tree branch during a live report. Please get this man off the street. pic.twitter.com/D6UOizGArc
— Scott Gustin (@ScottGustin) September 28, 2022
Then there was Robert Ray of Fox Weather, who did a live report during which time he looked like he was on the verge of being blown into a marina.
Four years ago during a live hit in the middle of Hurricane Florence, a Houston-based reporter got hit with a large, flying chunk of sheet metal.
Ten years ago, reporters in the New York area tempted fate by telling Superstorm Sandy, “Challenge accepted.” It didn’t go well for some of them.
All of this is to say that Total Coverage! is hardly enough to justify sending reporters into the middle of a vortex. Any new information they have to share can just easily be disclosed from anywhere but amid flying debris. It’s completely unnecessary.
And while we’re here, TV news stations also don’t need to send reporters to the airport on holiday weekends. We know the airports suck on holidays, so there’s no need to bring them to our living rooms.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
