Indianapolis ABC television affiliate WRTV wanted its viewers to see the complaints it received after preempting Bachelor in Paradise last night for report on a series of tornadoes that touched down nearby, so it posted some on its website.
Bachelor in Paradise is where some of the rejected Bachelor/Bachelorette suitors go to drink, mingle and canoodle their way to another shot at love on national television. Source: TVSpy.
But wait, there’s more…
Maybe these folks didn’t know they could watch it online later, here. In today’s digital age, there’s no reason to think TV is a linear timeline anymore. They would rather risk getting mowed down by a tornado because they are unaware instead of waiting I suppose.
This is another clear cut case of “warning fatigue” (something NOAA recognizes) combined with fixation on something that is pointless entertainment. And, it isn’t just in the USA, Britain has it too.
My friend Mike Smith speaks of this problem in his book Warnings: The true story of how science tamed the weather.
I’ve read it, and I’ve lived and experienced much of what he’s written about in the quest to make forecasting, especially severe weather forecasting, more accurate, timely, and specific. For those of us that prefer practical approaches over the rampant speculation on mere wisps of connections to climate this book is for you.
I recall once early in my career that I had to go on live and interrupt 60 Minutes to deliver a tornado warning. I got a few calls as well.
Interestingly, while “warning fatigue” was well known long ago when too many weather bulletins occur and the populace tunes out because they weren’t personally affected, so it goes today with the increasingly shrill climate warnings we see in the media.
The public is starting to tune those out too.
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Yes, you can watch episodes of many shows the next day on line, frequently at extra expense ala CBS app. However, we are also warned about tornadoes and other disasters by the same digital means. So this argument cuts both ways. Moreover, as those of us who live in tornado alley can attest scrolls across the bottom of the screen are quite effective and don’t disrupt viewers attention. Now if there is a tornado on the ground threatening a community that is another issue requiring an all media on deck approach.
Shoot, all ya gotta do is put a TV in yer shelter. They got some real nice ones with gene’s an showers an all, just run yer TV cable down there too.
Then ya can watch the news too iffen ya wanna once the Batchellor(ette) is over
What I don’t like is when TheBumma interrupts Big Brother
Thought the Bummer WAS Big Brother…
Hey, die happy – why get educated and learn to think? Bachelor in Paradise is the perfect make believe.
You’re missing the “absolute-below-the carpet-lowest-common-denominator” brain dead level vacuum at work. It’s a matter of recognizing the day-to-day reality of Reality TV’s culture of addiction to here-and-now gratification to mind killing make believe.
To the extent there’s any form of coherent thinking going at all in these segments of the population it’s perfectly OK to die while insisting on watching their preferred mind-killing pig fill schlock…
SOUNDS LIKE A HEIDI MOMENT—-OOPS SHOWING MY AGE.
For all you youngens, the Heidi travesty had nothing to do with the weather. Fortunately the NFL rectified that situation and now games must be shown to the end.
A bit more info for those who don’t know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Game
The pertinent quote:
“The Heidi Game or Heidi Bowl was an American Football League game played on November 17, 1968, between the Oakland Raiders and the visiting New York Jets. The game was notable for its finish, in which Oakland scored two touchdowns in the final minute to win the game 43–32, but was named for a decision by the game’s television broadcaster, NBC, to break away from its coverage of the game on the east coast to broadcast the television film Heidi, causing many viewers to miss the Raiders’ comeback.”
Football fans had a right to complain.
Those complaining about a tornado warning making them miss anything on TV, well, one of the complainers did say something about rethinking priorities…..
(Or maybe this is a reflection of what happens when all the dire CAGW warnings have fallen flat?)
I’d rather watch Heidi or even paint dry instead of American Football
Yeah. Back when football was football and … Oh look a musical.
1saveenergy,
What other kind of football is there?
You surely don’t follow the kind where there is a stadium full of people watching the grass grow?
That was 1969, wasn’t it? Final score: Oakland 32, NY Jets 29, I think.
Nope, Gunga Din has it right.
Here’s a good link:
http://www.raiders.com/news/article-1/Heidi-Bowl/97e7c348-3673-4d68-9a23-c5c7937c6e81
I’m thinking Aesop’s Fables and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Warning fatigue has been known for a very long time.
Weather warning fatigue is dangerous. I’m glad you brought out the Darwin Award aspect. I pay more attention to warnings now due to WUWT, which does a good job of covering severe weather events and the conditions leading up to them.
Nowadays it seems, if ten cows fart in a Canadian field at the same time, The Weather Network puts out a “Severe Weather Alert” !!
There has been a tendency (or temptation) recently to exaggerate and blow out of proportion whatever weather is coming in. Occasionally, of course, a weather event really is serious, so a high-powered warning is warranted. But a garden-variety thunderstorm? A couple of inches of snow? A 45-mph wind gust? These are common occurrences, nothing worthy of interrupting a program or even emphasizing on the weather segment. A tornado bearing down on a town or village? That’s a different matter entirely, a life-or-death situation requiring warning as soon as possible to as many people as possible. “Bachelorette Boops-a-daisy” can go hang for the few minutes it takes to tell me where the tornado is now, where it’s headed, whether and how soon it might hit my house. TV’s fun programs can be pleasant enough, but rational adults can do without them at need (power outage, for example). A real warning about real danger is essential, the primary purpose of mass communication, and it overcalls all routine broadcasts.
My weather radio had an alarm that went off for warnings. It used to be for a severe storm of some sort, but recently they demanded my attention for things like Red Flag Warnings (which basically means don’t burn brush; it is too dry and windy and the fire will spread.) “OK”, I sighed to myself at 1:00 AM. “I won’t get out of bed and start fires in the woods.” But the warnings got more and more trivial. The warnings went off at 4:00 AM for stuff like patches of fog or icy bridges, to warn early morning commuters. I’m pretty grumpy before I have a coffee, when my sleep is interrupted. Is it warning fatigue that silenced that old radio? (Or is it morning fatigue?)
…Or was it a sudden impact with the wall ?
My phone does that now…no weather radio needed.
Fortunately I only recently got a cell phone, and haven’t a clue how to use it. Mostly it is my camera.
Some media are apparently starting to get it. Global TV coverage of the Louisiana rain and floods did not use “unprecedented” or “worst ever” once. They used “biggest event in living memory of the residents”. You could almost see the broadcasters gritting their teeth as the said that. It would appear a new editorial policy is evolving at Global TV. Quite surprising but possibly due to the warming fatigue effect.
I think that people are constantly fact-checking their claims more and they’re being called out on their alarmist rhetoric and becoming more wary of using sensationalist terminology. With the Ellicott City flooding, people were very quick to point out how flood-prone that city actually is and that the “once in a thousand year” event had happened over and over again in the last 100 years.
They can only take the fear-mongering so far before it turns absurd.
Once TV channels realized they could hype the weather for ratings, disasters from all over were featured. Fox does not have a Weather Report, rather it is a “Weather Alert” from the “Extreme Weather Center”. The other day I heard the extreme weather reporter advise umbrellas for the NYC area.
All part of the effort to instill the proper fear of the impending doom of global warming. You will also notice the NWS has increased the severeness of the verbiage associated with each event to emphasize the expected danger. I believe all of this is to emphasize how much worse and more dangerous the weather is due to global warming.
Isn’t that called “language inflation”?
This one I can relate to as chief meteorologist for one of our major network affiliates here in Indiana from 1982-1993. Times were a bit different back then. We didn’t have doppler radar and the warnings were not as timely or numerous and of course most people only had 3 main networks to watch and 1 chance to see their favorite programs. If you cut in during their favorite program, it could be very upsetting.
Even with tornado warnings, we tried to be quickly in and out. Of course we only had a fraction of the information that’s available today, so it didn’t make sense to stay on and repeat the same things. Running crawls on the bottom of the screen can provide the worded warning, while the program runs. We tried using a split screen also but you can’t have audio from both and that doesn’t work well.
Split screen with just a radar on one side and crawl running on the bottom was another option as they watched and heard the regularly scheduled program.
So a tv meteorologist is aware that they are ticking off many viewers(often making most of them unhappy) but has a responsibility to broadcast, potentially life saving information to a small fraction of viewers. If it was a tornado warning for a fringe county effecting a few% of our viewers, you knew that it was a negative overall to most people but never hesitated and got out quick. Sometimes not quick enough for some folks, including your boss or people in management, that assessed value based on how it effected ratings.
Today, they do “wall to wall” coverage whenever there is a tornado warning anywhere on our local stations. There is no better way to maximize the dissemination of useful, often life saving information during a severe weather warning than via an experienced, good communicating television meteorologist.
Pretty sad that Millennials care more about a fantasy TV show than they do about reality ! They will always be remembered as the ” Me Me Me ” generation…
Those not killed by the tornado that rudely interrupted their fantasy TV.
Not having a TV, I rely on sirens and the mark1 eyeball. Seems to work just fine.
The “crawlers” work well. The warning simply cannot make people who are literally willing to die to see a TV show take cover. That’s an issue separate from issuing a warning and not one meterologists have any control over.
In a warming world we can expect more frequent interruptions of our tv programs.
And, of course, a cooling world will have its dangers too, “Doppler radar indicates a fast moving glacier to the northwest of New York City. Authorities advise people in the threatened area to remain alert. Walls of ice have the potential of inflicting serious or fatal injury on persons in their line of advance.”
Millennials don’t really care. It’s all outdated thinking and warnings and media.
I would rather watch dried paint fade than Bachelor in Paradise.
No contest! Fading paint wins hands-down, Steve.
Ahhh! That Purple!
I was unaware of the existence of this program. I have now placed it at the head of my list of things I never want to waste my time on, begrudging even the time it took to do that.
Not quite the same, but here in Toronto, we’ve been warned for days about a “rain event”. They were actually telling people to “think ahead and perhaps not plan any outdoor events”. I wish I were making that up.
When I was younger, these were called “all day rains” and they didn’t really bother you. If you had enough comics.
Oh, and the “rain even” gave us…12.20 mm of rain. For those not into metric, that’s just over 12 dimes worth. Armageddon, I tells yah. Compare that to the mere 28 mm of rain that fell in the dark times of THREE DAYS AGO…jeeze.
And they wonder why nobody believes them anymore.
Well, the intelligence of that demographic is not in doubt anymore.
People should turn deep shades of color when admitting they consider BiP a must watch show…
Was it ever? The question of intelligence I mean, this is the priority mindset of many of the youngsters of today (Oh my gawd, I’m sounding like my grandmother!) who need a short sharp lesson, not on “reality” TV shows, but on the reality of real life.
Personally my family lost everything they had to Hitler’s bombing of London night after night which, although I was born after the war, impacted on my life for most of my childhood, sort of makes one think about the fact that trivia is not important.
I’m reposting this…..my comment has not appeared but wordpress is telling me I have already posted this!
Was it ever? The question of intelligence I mean, this is the priority mindset of many of the youngsters of today (Oh my gawd, I’m sounding like my grandmother!) who need a short sharp lesson, not on “reality” TV shows, but on the reality of real life.
Personally my family lost everything they had to Hitler’s bombing of London night after night which, although I was born after the war, impacted on my life for most of my childhood, sort of makes one think about the fact that trivia is not important.
[Your comment went into the moderation queue. .mod]
I can recall talking with a customer at a store I worked at back when “Survivors” was on. Reality TV, they called it. I can recall how angry the customer was because someone was about to be attacked by a wild animal on the show when some news item interrupted the program. She was livid because she was never going to know if the person on the show was going to survive the attack! And I have had customers doing their shopping and suddenly realize they didn’t have time to check out and get home to watch “‘Survivors” as well, so they abandoned their carts and left. It always was hard for me to understand how “adults” could watch a TV show and believe it was “filmed live as they watched” as well as was legitimate. Like, hello, who to hell do you think is running the camera on “Lost at Sea,” or whatever that “reality TV show was? Local monkeys in the trees?
And they vote. Any wonder why the Country is in such dire straits.
Exactly – makes one wonder if our republic (note that I did NOT say democracy) will survive if very many voters / citizens understand so little of the world around them – and don’t care either!
What is even worse, some of them get voted for….
““Lost at Sea,” or whatever that “reality TV show was?”
Wasn’t it called “Gilligan’s Island”
They did do a reality series about the “Real Gilligan’s Island”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430851/
pitting people against one another to see who would make the best Gilligan etc..
I remember that one. Wife watched one episode. It was more like “who is Gilligan going to sleep with, Mary Anne or Ginger?” Pathetic voyeurism.
You gave it more of a shot than I did.
Survivor was actually caught: they went from a close up of “near drowning” contestants, then cut to a helicopter shot…BUT, there was no sign of…the camera operators who would have to be in the water for the close ups.
Oops.
I could almost handle the idea that these shows exist, if it wasn’t for the over-analysis on OTHER shows and media, about what are basically game shows.
trying a photo:
http://i.imgur.com/eucxWac.jpg
I live in Avon, IN. That tornado passed within just a couple miles of my house, and passed much closer to the homes of friends of mine. The advanced warning systems we now have allowed my friends to get their families to safety well in advance of the storm. Who knows what would have happened without stations like WRTV providing coverage of this potential disaster?
It is absolutely sickening to me that these idiots think their mindless entertainment is more important than the lives of people in their own community. I should not be surprised, though, it’s exactly this sort of willful ignorance that leads to people accepting warmist propaganda.
Is any aspect of human thought and behavior really surprising?
“Is any aspect of human thought and behavior really surprising?”
Specific things, yes. But if I mention them here, I’m considered a bad person.
They don’t have an EBS system? You know the one… screech (two tone or it fails) screech .. this is the emergency broadcast system … tornado warning for (insert place) for the (duration of warning) …. screech screech screech… repeat if necessary. That is what it is for.
You are right though. I think the general public is getting mighty sick of the interrupt to just see the anchors speculate on what terrible thing possibly might happen. Sometimes it seems like a weird sort of glee on their parts… There has to be a system people trust and are willing to listen to. All of their air time disaster mongering means nothing if the channel gets changed.
Funny,
I saw the acronym and immediately thought
Extreme B S
…”All of their air time disaster mongering means nothing if the channel gets changed.”
…..THAT is what actually makes it more dangerous to public well being…
When I was a kid visiting my grandparents in Wisconsin (Late 60s early 70s) they would usually run a crawler on the bottom of the screen, if I remember correctly. The Emergency Broadcast System is used in the event of an actual emergency, not a potential one, as far as I know.
What’s funny is when the EBS will suddenly come on in the middle of radio programming, with no lead in stating it’s a test. That gets your attention.
Here in the Indy area, I was part of the festivities last night. This was not a garden variety situation of some trees getting uprooted and a few barns losing some roofing tiles. This is a major metro area, and this little cell cut across interstate highways loaded with evening rush hour traffic, suburbs with kids practicing out on soccer fields, etc. I was really glad when the radio to which I was listening cut in and told me the path of the storm so I could figure out if I was driving into danger. The level of detail in the information, precise location and projected path off the cell, let me know how to avoid it. The emergency services worked well and there were no serious injuries as a result. I can’t understand why anyone would complain about the distribution of such valuable information.
htb, how long have you lived in Indiana?
If you pay attention while driving, you will see you are driving into danger.
Not always. The “funnel cloud” can be obscured by rain sheets, or be so close to the ground that it’s indistinguishable from surrounding wall clouds. Or nigh invisible at night. Tornadoes can also travel fast and make sudden changes of direction. And the vortex can extend for a mile or more in radius around the funnel cloud. So even in a midwest state with largely unimpeded view of the sky, a tornado is still capable of taking you by surprise.
Retired Kit, I could see weather all around me when I was driving. This was one strong little cell in a whole system of rain which had several bands. Between buildings, hills, trees, and poor visibility, it wasn’t entirely clear the relative direction of the big danger. It wasn’t like there was one massive cell with a 20,000 foot wall that was black with blue skies in the other 3 directions. I’ve lived in Indiana for 30+ years of my life, and have been through plenty of storms. This looked like a big rain system, and the weather alert caught me by surprise given what I could see.
All that aside, the point of the story is to question why anyone would be “annoyed” by a weather alert interrupting the regularly scheduled programming. If it means that somewhere somebody who otherwise wouldn’t have sought cover did and that saves them from harm, isn’t that interruption worth it?
Really, I agree with the point of the post but then again for people like me and probably many others here the tornado coverage IS entertainment as long as there isn’t a tornado bearing down on us.
As I drive my truck I get fleet wide messages from dispatch on my qualcom warning about major traffic back ups. It gets annoying driving down the road and listening on the annunciator about some traffic back up 1,000 or more miles away that has nothing to do with where I’m going at the time. But every great once in awhile it applies to me and I can vary my route to keep from sitting for hours. To complain about some show being interrupted because of information that may be very important or even life saving for other viewers just shows the level of maturity of those complaining. Ironic that the people saying that the station needs to review it’s priorities are the ones demonstrating that they are the ones that need to do so.
It is also a clear indication that Natural Selection is not an exact science.
(scrolling on the bottom of the screen) “Nuclear Missiles inbound. Tape at 11. “
LOL
I am so stealing that.
ICBMs inbound, time to buy a carton Winstons!
The stations response to Ashley was a hoot … “If we named the tornadoes Chad would that make up for the Bachelor in Paradise interruption?”
https://twitter.com/ashllleynicole
The things that gets up my nose are the AMBER Alerts. I don’t remember hearing one where the kid was actually in danger. I haven’t heard of an AMBER Alert actually saving someone’s life. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) In fact researchers have called them “crime control theater”.
..Not sure where you live commieBob, but in North America,….Amber Alerts work !
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/13/justice/amber-alert-hannah/
The article does cite a couple of cases where an AMBER Alert was absolutely justified.
All of the alerts I have ever heard were parental abductions and the kids were in no danger at all.
Things could get worse. Now we’re going to have “Blue Alerts to warn about threats to police officers and help find the suspects who carry them out” and Silver Alerts for missing seniors.
I have no problem with public service announcements, like tornado warnings, that are important and about which I can do something. If there’s a missing senior citizen near me, I’m happy to help. On the other hand, I don’t need to hear about a parental abduction a thousand miles away (yes, I heard one of those) and I would sure resent being wakened at night to hear about it.
Commiebob
There have been several very good Amber Alerts in western Canada. They have helped recover abductees and they have helped find perpetrators and remains.
This is the priority mindset of many of the youngsters of today (Oh my gawd, I’m sounding like my grandmother!) who need a short sharp lesson, not on “reality” TV shows, but on the reality of real life.
Personally my family lost everything they had to Hitler’s bombing of London night after night which, although I was born after the war, impacted on my life for most of my childhood, sort of makes one think about the fact that trivia is not important.
This reaction is so ridiculous, I can’t even think of a response.
….This is another clear cut case of “warning fatigue” (something NOAA recognizes) ..
A major reason that Britain voted to leave the EU was ‘warning fatigue’. Only it’s not really ‘fatigue’. It’s seeing that most of these warnings are self-serving lies.
We were warned that our economy, if not the entire Western world’s economy, would collapse if we voted to Leave. We were told it would spell the end or European civilisation, and possibly the start of WW3. We were told not to vote Leave by the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Heads of the Bank of England, the IMF and the World Bank, the assembled heads of all the countries in the EU, The President of the United States and the Pope. Literally!
Which was why we voted Leave…
.Which was why we voted Leave……. After losing the best in WW 1 and II it took this long grow a pair back. There’s hope the Brits yet.
It was not as if those giving the warnings had any track record of successful predictions anyway. Osborne’s budgets collapsed within days, Lagarde and her IMF had to apologise for crap forecasts for the UK economy, Carney is a joke with his ‘i will be raising interest rates when this happens, no when this happens, no actually when this happens etc.
And good on yer, mate. From Jan 64, I served nearly 10 years in the USAF in the UK, thus could never reconcile myself with Westminister being dictated to by the French and the Germans. Of course, the Brits who had the greatest influence on my perception of Britain’s rightful place in European affairs were mostly WWWII vets, soldiers, airmen, sailors and civilians, who knew from painful personal experience what happens when tyrants are accommodated by weak leaders. The rest of the western nations are well advised to look to their own sovereignty.
OT — when I was reading near the end of the article, I could see the image of the book cover, but wasn’t really focusing it. It looked like an image of the shark on Jaws — the red umbrella looked like a frowning mouth, and the background on the book was kind of shark colored. Time to see the shrink?
How many times have you seen Sharknado?😄