I just got done watching about 30 minutes of the special “Hurricane Irene Information” Channel 259 on DirecTV where they are carrying live reports from ABC7 out of New York City. I’ve watched many TV channels tonight like it.
I had to laugh, because they had some kid with a goofy smile on his face named Scott Goldberg in Times Square who looked like “Fez” from That 70’s Show prattling on about the wind and rain while meanwhile in the background the mega-signage of Times Square flashing in the background and cabbies going along the street in a business as usual mode along with some Saturday night revelers heckling the camera from behind him. The lower third super says “Irene Arrives”.
Then they switched to a live report from Ocean City, MD, with some guy standing in what looked like the city park pointing out waving trees in the background, but he himself had no trouble standing up to do the report. Some B-roll showed some guy mugging for the camera elsewhere trying to “hold up” a tree. Of course the tree wasn’t falling over at all and he was just doing the usual silly things people do on camera sometimes.
Now we have a reporter in a red windbreaker who’s standing just off some rip-rap on the beach in New Jersey knee deep in some muddy water, holding a mic and adjusting his hip waders. He doesn’t realize he’s on camera and neither does the camera operator, who reveals when he pulls back just how “staged” the shot actually is.
Then we get treated to more shots of reporters around the area, standing in wind and rain, with idle commentary, basically waiting for something significant to report. B-roll footage used in live shots is now on repeats, so it appears they are out of fresh video. So they pop back to the weather center to report on wind gusts from 57-70 mph in the Maryland beach areas.
The weather Channel has some guy doing standup reports in Virgina Beach Virgina, and they ran a collage of various standups he did during the day, in various poses and weather attire against the wind and rain. Meanwhile motorists in the background downtown area seem to be going about there business as usual.
Then we had the report of Obama “taking command” in the emergency bunker…for a Category 1 storm no less. I don’t ever recall a president doing this. It seemed more like a campaign photo op than anything else.
On other channels I’ve seen tonight: footage of wind, rain, boats, rocking in the marina, some tree and limbs down, and some roof and building damages that are all consistent with a strong storm like a Nor’easter, but what I don’t see is anything beyond that. Now that just may be they don’t have access to the “hardest hit” areas or it may mean there’s just not a lot happening. There’s lots of hand waving and graphical bling though.
First let me say that forecasters of this storm have done an admirable job of forecasting the track of this storm, our friend Joe Bastardi has done a great job at getting the word out and NOAA’s NHC has done a good job at keeping the country updated. Information is flowing smoothly, and there seems to be no hiccups at all there.
It is not a problem that officials have erred somewhat on the side of caution. It is better to occasionally overreact to potential disasters than be caught flat-footed and under prepared when more severe disasters strike. It would be arrogant to play “Monday morning quarterback”, literally Monday in this case, and to berate officials who had to make a judgement call and put public safety first.
But while the track forecasts and warnings were spot on, the intensity forecast however hasn’t been as accurate. Yes there are 70+ mph wind gusts, storm surge, widespread power outages, and reports of general damage, but as this storm moves in the Washington-Baltimore and NYC areas, it just doesn’t seem all that bad as it was advertised to be.
I certainly don’t want to make light of anyone who has suffered because of the storm, that’s not my intent at all. I’m only focusing on the state of news reporting.
I recall images of “The Perfect Storm” from 1991 which wasn’t a hurricane, and it seemed to produce damages far worse than this storm. Here it is below on satellite:
Irene, except for being closer to land in in this shot, doesn’t look all that different from “The Perfect Storm” of 1991.
In summary, it seems to me that much of the news coverage is just a bit “over the top” to me, mostly because they’ve committed themselves to round the clock coverage, but really have little to report on. They have to fill time somehow.
And where oh where is the AGW fueled intensity forecast by wild eyed activist turned arrestee Bill McKibben who said ocean temperatures were “bizarrely high”? He said:
“These warm ocean temperatures will also make Irene a much wetter hurricane than is typical, since much more water vapor can evaporate into the air from record-warm ocean surfaces.”
Sure it dumped a lot of rain, but no more than most other storms. For a hurricane that supposedly “has global warming as a middle name“, it sure doesn’t act like it. People should stop listening to this arrogant activist, he hyped the storm worse than the worst TV news reports.
Our own Charles the Moderator passed on a piece of video a few days ago that captures the essence of the state of TV news reporting on weather from 14 years ago. How little has changed. Here it is:
If you have similar examples of TV news excess, post them below.
UPDATE: This morning we are being treated to lots of imagery of down trees and branches, street flooding, and people gawking at waves along boardwalks in Long Island. It seems Irene wasn’t really much worse than a strong Nor’easter. Places with aged stormwater systems like Philadelphia couldn’t handle the combination of storm surge and heavy rain so there is a lot of flooding there.
It looks like it’s time for Anthony to start a nation wide anemometer survey.
No disrespect to the people who died in NC, but this news clip just about sums up Irene in Virginia. WARNING!! Brief Nudity. You gotta love live TV.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewb_N5NNU_s&w=640&h=390]
I take issue with the statement:
“…that forecasters of this storm have done an admirable job of forecasting the track of this storm…”
Early on, the forecast was for it to track south of Hispaniola, putting that island on the more dangerous right side of the storm track. It wound up passing north. Then for days the NHC forecast had it hitting Florida, when the consensus of the models was east of the state and parallel the coast.
It seems there is a deliberate policy choice to exaggerate the hazard. This may not be a bad thing in this context since there are after all substantial uncertainties in the modeling. (At one point, some of the models highlighted on weatherunderground had landfall in Canada.) I would prefer the government to report it straight. It seems that all statistics go through some political filter. Gross Domestic Product estimates that initially come in high are inevitably revised downward in subsequent months. The administration is well served by putting the best face on the “recovery”. It seems that USDA’s crop forecasts are similarly optimistic until confronted with hard reality. The skeptic in me thinks this is to done deliberately to try to contain food price inflation. On top of government support for the CAGW scam, I am finding it hard to believe anything coming out of the government. It is not just the present administration either. (Witness Bush’s WMD in Iraq assertions.)
Back in the context of tropical storm forecasting, crying wolf repeatedly will eventually leave the public apathetic to a real danger.
I watched a few minutes of FOX news coverage on SkyUk. Presenter in foreground appeared to be having difficulty standing upright in the wind (Long Island?). Behind him a passer-by in a tee shirt, cutoff trousers and a baseball hat leaned casually on the seaside railings and lit a cigarette.
TV is the most cut throat business (next to selling AGW) on the planet. If you don’t get your sound bite in as The Most Memorable in history, you’re toast. If it’s not windy enough on the boardwalk, stand between two buildings –with the boardwalk behind you– to magnify the tunnel effect of galeforce wind and surf on your hair, and your clothes being savagely ripped off your body. Just pray that a little old lady and her dog doesn’t decide to walk along the boardwalk while you’re doing it, it ruins the heroic effect and makes you look like an idiot in front of a hollywood storm fan with some guy out of sight throwing buckets of water in your face.
(Don’t know what the poor guy’s name was; no doubt we never will;-)
Oh bless you for reporting on this…..I was glued to the 24/7 media just for a good laugh all day yesterday…..The reporting was so desperate that I was embarassed for the broadcasters… Seriously, do they not realize how silly they come across…. Whenever someone with any knowelege would come on and say this will not be that big or its been downgraded and so on…the reporters would panic and get in there with some dumb comeback to keep the sensationlisation going…… One of our favorites was a CNN reporter telling about the storm going up to Canada and hitting Portland Oregon….(he meant Portland Maine…) He was too excited to correct himself…. Also Fox news made mention of the govenors warning about getting the “hell off the coast.” The reporter said “I guess we can say “hell” because it’s midnight. What the hell??? On the west coast it was 9:00…Does the east coast reporters know there are towns, states, and even another coast west of New York…. ?? Washington (out here we don’t put state after that) Oregon, (pronounced Ore-gun, two sylabols) Well, Cailf. they probabably know about???
Anyway…I have been througly entertained by how ignorant our media is… * right now Fox news is interviewing someone from Ocean City MD…the reporter is desperate to get the mayor to say how horribly they were hit…he keeps saying they are fine…reporter says “no your not,we are looking at pictures…He says “we are fine.” She shows pictures of the deadly foam on the coast…and says “look at all of this are you worried about it…” He says…”it’s cleaned up.” She is done with the interview….. Thanks again for doing the media the justice they have earned…
UK Guardian has a deliciously snarky ‘coverage of the coverage’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/aug/28/hurricane-irene-new-york-live-coverage1
Steve from Rockwood says:
August 28, 2011 at 7:18 am
“Then we had the report of Obama “taking command” in the emergency bunker…for a Category 1 storm no less.”
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Don’t forget George Bush who didn’t take command of the Hurricane Katrina debacle until day 4. At least Obama has a pulse.
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Obama is a child king who’s handlers allowed him to play with the controls like a father does his son on “Take Your Child to Work” day.
“Then we had the report of Obama “taking command” in the emergency bunker…for a Category 1 storm no less. I don’t ever recall a president doing this. It seemed more like a campaign photo op than anything else.”
I wonder if this could be Obama’s “killer rabbit” moment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
Roger Knights says:
August 28, 2011 at 9:47 am
“74 mph is the threshold for hurricane status. Irene’s maximum sustained wind was 75 mph. If wind speeds fall off drastically away from the eyewall, why was the NHC saying that “HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 125 MILES”? HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 125 MILES…205 KM…FROM THE CENTER…AND TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 320 MILES…520 KM. ”
Normally maximum wind speeds quoted are in the eye wall. So when you hear of 120 mph winds that is only in the eye wall and while the hurricane force winds can extend outward fairly far it is not the 120 mph winds. So when I said wind speed falling off drastically from the eye wall it doesn’t mean they go away but just that they are substantially lower than the maximum speeds in the eye wall. I gave the example of Hurricane Charley in 2004 where I was 22 miles from the center where there were 150 mph winds yet I only experienced winds in the 50 – 60 mph range. But then Charley was a very small, compact storm. Irene is huge.
Irene’s eye wall clearly disappeared before the max winds wound down to 75 mph. The lack of an eye wall signaled the death of the tropical system and then what you had left was a very broad circulation of 75 mph winds that spread out over a large area. Please do not misunderstand me, I am not saying this still wasn’t a dangerous situation. However, it was no longer a tropical system which had a heat engine at it’s core driving the winds. It was more like a nor’easter than at hurricane at that point.
charles the moderator says:
August 28, 2011 at 1:55 am
Today Show’s Michelle Kosinski in Canoe in 2005
Watched Anderson Cooper earlier lamenting to the studio staff about the terrible conditions when two joggers trotted by. Made us think immediately of the Canoe video. 🙂
Irene good night Irene good night
Good night Irene Good night Irene
I’ll see you in my dreams.
Like many encounters, the expectation can be more exciting than the event.
I turned on the TV last night and saw in the teletext
“Hurricane Irene tears into New York with lashing rain and ferocious winds.”
So I quickly tuned into CNN fearful of seeing 9/11 all over again. What did I find?
A rather embarrassed reporter standing in some gentle rain rather gobsmacked after just being told by a weather forecaster he was now in the worst of the hurricane. Earlier while desperately trying to find some drama all he could come up with was an umbrella turned inside out, a broken branch that he could pick up which had fallen on some-one’s car boot and a blocked storm drain.
The only thing missing was the old lady wearing gumboots walking her dog behind him.
Look, I am all for being prepared but the media has just got to learn to report facts rather than carrying on like global warming alarmists on what if, may and could happen. The US responded magnificently after 9/11 and the media seemed calmer and more professional when real drama was unfolding before their eyes than they did last night trying to invent one. A bridge too far? Or being wise after the event? Who knows but I know where my money was.
By far, the crappiest reporting yet…
———————————————–
As hurricane Irene approaches, this reporter thinks he’s standing in sea foam, when it’s really a toxic mix of raw sewage, bacteria and pollution, according to MYFOXNY.
Charles the Moderator, YOU ROCK!!! (and Anthony too of course, for allowing him to post the Windstorm 97 & Canoe vids. Thanks also to the folks who posted the Irene weathercast with ther herd of young men in swim trunks showing just how horrible the wind really was at the time. I gotta bet that the cameraman on that one was doing a little some shakey hand camera works there on purpose, all for the viewer’s benefit and to give a more realistic portrayal, right?
So for my contribution: Man Swimming In the Streets of Queens (ya gotta wonder if that water backed up thru the sewers & if so, n-n-n-o-t sure I’d wanna be swimming in it)
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/sunday-morning-drive-how-bout-a-swim-video-of-man-swimming-in-the-streets-of-queens/
Watching that Weather Channel clip (several comments up) reminds me of high school kids … no, not the young men running around getting their adrenaline rush as they ‘moon’ the camera … no, I’m talking about that uptight, sanctimonious, self-righteous “reporter”.
Dude, get a clue !! If it was a truly dangerous hurricane, you’d be the only person out there and then you’d be the fool. Irene was but a very big thunderstorm. The kind we all experience, where news vans rush out to get a shot of the one tree that the storm knocked down onto some poor person’s house, with tarp hastily placed over the gaping hole in the roof.
Tom in Florida says:
August 28, 2011 at 12:39 pm
“… Please do not misunderstand me, I am not saying this still wasn’t a dangerous situation. However, it was no longer a tropical system which had a heat engine at it’s core driving the winds. It was more like a nor’easter than at hurricane at that point.”
Pretty much. You can see the transition between points 27 and 28 of the GFDL phase diagram as it went from symmetric warm core low to an asymmetric warm core low. The first stages of eventually going extra-tropical.
http://moe.met.fsu.edu/cyclonephase/gfdl/irene09l/fcst/archive/11082812/1.phase1.zoom.png
OK. It’s 6 PM here in western New Hampshire. I’m calling it… IRENE WAS A BIG F-A-I-L. No wind here at all, though we got a lot of rain this morning (and there is some localized flooding in low lying areas). No power outages here either, though we’re surrounded by trees. Nothing catastrophic. No panic. No nothing. That’s all…
Fes was the guy in the 70’s show. They called him that because no one could be bothered to learn his name, so they shortened up Foreign Exchange Student and called him that.
I checked my tree rings, and believe me, Irene was the worstest storm ever. It was caused by CO2 and abnormally hot sea levels. amen.
Who pressured nhc to keep calling it a hurricane when it broke up yesterday afternoon and was clearly not a hurricane? Why were they claiming 65 mph winds this morning when no surface station even measured a gust over 30 mph? the science is exact enough to know that hurricanes weaken quickly as they move north over colder water. If we get another real storm like hurricane gloria, the 92 noreaster, or god forbid the 1938 hurricane no one will listen. Obama wanted a crisis he could use to show his effectiveness, but nature failed to deliver.
The nhc forecasts yesterday were absurd, showing the storm moving all the way from NC to new england with almost no loss of wind speed. Hurricanes die quickly over land or cold water, and irene got a big gulp of dry air yesterday over VA beach that wrecked it’s circulation. It had no cyclonic pattern after that.
yet Diane Sawyer Sunday evening asked, where is this hurricane going to hit next during her newscast.
re: Steve from Rockwood says: August 28, 2011 at 7:18 am
Never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t realize that at the time Bush legally couldn’t enter the state or do anything that way until expressly requested to do so, in writing, by the Governor of Louisiana – at the time that was Kathleen Blanco. She knew that was the case, and still delayed. The press did an utterly disgusting job with the whole Katrina situation. Vague recollection, I think after that the laws were changed so the fed gov could take charge/enter the state if they felt a situation warranted it. Which, of course, further diminishes states rights.
The apocalyptic killer hurricane Irene is front page of The West Australian newspaper here on the other side of the world, with a big photograph of somebody holding an umbrella in Times Square and the banner headline of SHUTDOWN.
It’s an historic, graphic and chilling photograph of this climate change disaster as it shows the man with the umbrella and somebody else (possibly the only survivors left in New York) walking through the rain. There are no puddles but it’s obvious from the umbrella that there’s the potential for catastrophic flooding.
There’s a full page story inside the paper:
“Hurricane Irene has torn into New York, hammering Manhattan’s skyscrapers with fierce winds and threatening to flood the financial district after killing at least 12 people on the US east coast.
The first hurricane to hit the Big Apple for a generation swept in overnight, accompanied by lightning, reports of tornadoes and deafening rainfall.
Gales grew steadily to about 130kmh and the hurricane dropped 30cm of rain on areas on its way up the coast before it was downgraded to a tropical storm last night with winds still 105kmh.
The huge hurricane, 805km wide, threatened 65 million people on the Atlantic coast, which was estimated to be the most Americans ever affected by a single storm. etc, etc”
With trepidation, I’m expecting to watch our midday news and see the remains of New York as a few piles of twisted rubble amid the floodwaters. I’ll immediately be donating to the international relief efforts.
Are all 65 million of you east coast Americans now deaf because of the rainfall? I’ve got no idea how any of you have survived 30cm of that stuff, and the page 1 photo definitely proves it was rain. Thank goodness you’ve finally got Medicare!
I’m still trying to figure out why the umbrella wasn’t even flapping in the breeze, but it’s obvious that since there are only two people in the page 1 photo, everybody else in the city has been blown away by the hurricane winds.
If this doesn’t prove that climate change threatens your grandchildren, I have no idea what will. I’ll be donating $10 to the International New York Rebuilding Disaster Fund, but only on the condition that you don’t spend it on something that has carbon in it.
I wonder if the people killed in their cars were there because the were told to get in them to evacuate. Bloomberg is a idiot, Christie is worse.