Tweet
Ram57ta's post in another thread made me realize that people here could stand to read this:
Monday, August 29, 2011 1
The Hyping of Hurricane Irene
By Porter Fox
The storm of the century began as a half-inch blurb on the cover of last Friday’s The New York Times. The photo showed a lifeguard looking out to sea. A red flag flapped behind him, and behind that, were piles of cottony clouds with ominously dark underbellies. This was the beginning of Irene. Not the Irene that “barreled,” “blazed” and “marched along a path of destruction” up the I-95 corridor. But the media storm that both misinformed and scared the living hell out of anyone living within 800 miles of the Northeastern Seaboard.
Hurricanes don’t make landfall often along the heavily populated shores of the Northeast, but when they do they can be deadly. The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 was rated a Category 4 when it hit Narragansett Bay on August 25, killing more than 46 people. The New England Hurricane of 1938 left more than 600 dead, with winds of up to 186 mph before instruments broke. Then came Hurricane Gloria in 1985, the last hurricane to hit the New York area, causing $900 million in damage and killing eight.
By Friday afternoon, every news outlet from CNN to The New York Times to NPR had characterized Irene as “the storm of the century,” “storm of a generation” and generally The End of All Good and Living Things on the East Coast of the United States. I was in a hardware store in Hampton Bays, Long Island, when I first saw the frenzy. The line was out the door. Customers cradled armfuls of batteries, gas cans, flashlights and duct tape. When the man in front of me in line paid $750 in cash for a generator, sight unseen, I realized the storm had already hit—on televisions, computer screens and newspapers around the country. (I was at the store to repair a surfboard I dinged that morning. Yes, the waves were great.)
President Obama declared a State of Emergency for New York State on Friday, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a historic shutdown of the city’s entire public transit system. What was more shocking when I finally got home was the fact that little of the coverage reported what was actually happening with the storm—probability charts, track, strength, etc. All of this is easily accessible on the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) website, so I went and looked. The 2pm NHC update for the killer “menace” that was “careening” and “slamming” up the East Coast: sometime on Friday—for a nebulous meteorological reason no one could explain—it started weakening.
This was nearly two days before the storm hit, yet news of the aberration in Irene’s strength never made it into the media—nor did the fact that the weakening eerily resembled the devolution of Hurricane Gloria, which also didn’t live up to forecasters’ predictions. The headlines across the nation Friday night: New York City to mandatorily evacuate 370,000, for the first time in history.
Let’s be clear here, the media has an ethical obligation to warn us in the event of a natural disaster. Reporting the truth of a dire situation is part of the job. Yet the line between truth and frenzy has grown thinner over the years—as an increased number media outlets compete for dwindling advertising dollars. The fact is, drama sells. The sad truth about the America’s news in the Digital Age: it is going insane.
It takes a few storms to make a perfect storm. For Irene, there were four.
1) New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg—a man openly obsessed with image and legacy—was paranoid of repeating the botch job he did on Snowmageddon last winter.
2) Hurricane Katrina still looms large in the U.S., with local governments terrified of repeating Ray Nagin’s mistakes in New Orleans.
3) Hurricanes that don’t manifest make money—in sales of plywood, duct tape, food, water, batteries, and gasoline. Which is to say, that Obama’s declaration of a State of Emergency for half the East Coast (what about Pennsylvania?) may well have marked the beginning of his second stimulus package.
4) Lastly, which comes from my aunt Virginia who’s house I was in: “In a time of war and unrest, people just want to come together around something.”
Patrick Michaels, in a piece for Forbes.com titled Get Real: Hurricane Irene Should Be Renamed “Hurricane Hype,” was one of the first to call out the media and local governments on Saturday:
The problem with predicting the storm of the century is that when it doesn’t manifest you are left with millions of readers and viewers looking for…signs of the storm of century. And if you don’t provide them, people will turn the channel or click the mouse to find an outlet that does. So to satisfy audiences and keep ratings up, local and national news channels marched cub reporters and camera crews to the most dangerous hurricane-y looking breakwaters and seawalls they could find. Dressed in colorful ponchos and leaning into the wind and rain, they reported on “feeder bands” and “inner eyewalls” of what was quickly becoming a non-hurricane.
The Hyping of Hurricane Irene
By Porter Fox
The storm of the century began as a half-inch blurb on the cover of last Friday’s The New York Times. The photo showed a lifeguard looking out to sea. A red flag flapped behind him, and behind that, were piles of cottony clouds with ominously dark underbellies. This was the beginning of Irene. Not the Irene that “barreled,” “blazed” and “marched along a path of destruction” up the I-95 corridor. But the media storm that both misinformed and scared the living hell out of anyone living within 800 miles of the Northeastern Seaboard.
Hurricanes don’t make landfall often along the heavily populated shores of the Northeast, but when they do they can be deadly. The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 was rated a Category 4 when it hit Narragansett Bay on August 25, killing more than 46 people. The New England Hurricane of 1938 left more than 600 dead, with winds of up to 186 mph before instruments broke. Then came Hurricane Gloria in 1985, the last hurricane to hit the New York area, causing $900 million in damage and killing eight.
By Friday afternoon, every news outlet from CNN to The New York Times to NPR had characterized Irene as “the storm of the century,” “storm of a generation” and generally The End of All Good and Living Things on the East Coast of the United States. I was in a hardware store in Hampton Bays, Long Island, when I first saw the frenzy. The line was out the door. Customers cradled armfuls of batteries, gas cans, flashlights and duct tape. When the man in front of me in line paid $750 in cash for a generator, sight unseen, I realized the storm had already hit—on televisions, computer screens and newspapers around the country. (I was at the store to repair a surfboard I dinged that morning. Yes, the waves were great.)
President Obama declared a State of Emergency for New York State on Friday, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a historic shutdown of the city’s entire public transit system. What was more shocking when I finally got home was the fact that little of the coverage reported what was actually happening with the storm—probability charts, track, strength, etc. All of this is easily accessible on the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) website, so I went and looked. The 2pm NHC update for the killer “menace” that was “careening” and “slamming” up the East Coast: sometime on Friday—for a nebulous meteorological reason no one could explain—it started weakening.
This was nearly two days before the storm hit, yet news of the aberration in Irene’s strength never made it into the media—nor did the fact that the weakening eerily resembled the devolution of Hurricane Gloria, which also didn’t live up to forecasters’ predictions. The headlines across the nation Friday night: New York City to mandatorily evacuate 370,000, for the first time in history.
Let’s be clear here, the media has an ethical obligation to warn us in the event of a natural disaster. Reporting the truth of a dire situation is part of the job. Yet the line between truth and frenzy has grown thinner over the years—as an increased number media outlets compete for dwindling advertising dollars. The fact is, drama sells. The sad truth about the America’s news in the Digital Age: it is going insane.
It takes a few storms to make a perfect storm. For Irene, there were four.
1) New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg—a man openly obsessed with image and legacy—was paranoid of repeating the botch job he did on Snowmageddon last winter.
2) Hurricane Katrina still looms large in the U.S., with local governments terrified of repeating Ray Nagin’s mistakes in New Orleans.
3) Hurricanes that don’t manifest make money—in sales of plywood, duct tape, food, water, batteries, and gasoline. Which is to say, that Obama’s declaration of a State of Emergency for half the East Coast (what about Pennsylvania?) may well have marked the beginning of his second stimulus package.
4) Lastly, which comes from my aunt Virginia who’s house I was in: “In a time of war and unrest, people just want to come together around something.”
Patrick Michaels, in a piece for Forbes.com titled Get Real: Hurricane Irene Should Be Renamed “Hurricane Hype,” was one of the first to call out the media and local governments on Saturday:
Up until now (Friday evening) Irene has been very similar to 1985 hurricane Gloria, though a bit weaker. But the level of hype—because of its projected path near all of the I-95 major cities—is similar to that of 26 years ago.
When Gloria didn’t kill enough people to suit CBS’s Dan Rather—a serial hurricane hyper who made his career on 1961 Hurricane Carla—he yelled at poor [NHC Director] Neil Frank on live TV.
What had happened is that the night before landfall, Gloria took a sudden 40-mile jog to the east. The cyclone slid harmlessly east of the big cities, showing her weaker western side instead of the destructive northeast corner.
Irene has put on a remarkably similar show. Within the limits of forecasting error, Irene’s projected path makes it was impossible to rule out a major disaster. But, as a dangerous Category 3 storm within two days of land, something similar to what happened to Gloria occurred. Instead of going slightly off course, the power of her winds dropped markedly, at least as measured by hurricane hunter aircraft. Because it is prudent to not respond to every little tropical cyclone twitch (such as Gloria’s jog or Thursday’s wind drop), the Thursday evening forecast was virtually unchanged, the Internet went thermonuclear, and the Weather Channel’s advertising rates skyrocketed. From that point on, it became all Irene, all the time. With this level of noise, the political process has to respond with full mobilization. Hype begets hype.
When Gloria didn’t kill enough people to suit CBS’s Dan Rather—a serial hurricane hyper who made his career on 1961 Hurricane Carla—he yelled at poor [NHC Director] Neil Frank on live TV.
What had happened is that the night before landfall, Gloria took a sudden 40-mile jog to the east. The cyclone slid harmlessly east of the big cities, showing her weaker western side instead of the destructive northeast corner.
Irene has put on a remarkably similar show. Within the limits of forecasting error, Irene’s projected path makes it was impossible to rule out a major disaster. But, as a dangerous Category 3 storm within two days of land, something similar to what happened to Gloria occurred. Instead of going slightly off course, the power of her winds dropped markedly, at least as measured by hurricane hunter aircraft. Because it is prudent to not respond to every little tropical cyclone twitch (such as Gloria’s jog or Thursday’s wind drop), the Thursday evening forecast was virtually unchanged, the Internet went thermonuclear, and the Weather Channel’s advertising rates skyrocketed. From that point on, it became all Irene, all the time. With this level of noise, the political process has to respond with full mobilization. Hype begets hype.
Comment