Hurricane Irony: Lame Press Coverage

I’m hoping that all of you on the East Coast had an uneventful Hurricane Irene visit.  It’s always a pain to lose electricity and some tree branches, but hey, as I’ve been hearing all day today, it could’ve been worse.   I seriously can’t believe the coverage this weekend.  You’d have thought the martians had landed.  I think the corporate media out did itself.  So, I’m putting up any open thread so you can share your stories and I’m also putting up what I considered some of the most offensive press moments of the week.

My number one choice for stupid press tricks was who ever thought to call Ray Nagin on to the media circuit as a preparedness guru.  Remember, Ray Ray,  he was the mayor of New Orleans that basically put all the city buses right in the most flood prone sections of the city and hid in the penthouse of the Sheraton Hotel until the President showed up to offer him a shower about 5 days after landfall.  It gave all of us at Rising Tide 6 a source of endless jokes.

No, this wasn’t meant to be a joke. Although many believe the 2005 response to Hurricane Katrina was a colossal failure at every level of government, former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin appeared on MSNBC on Friday to offer preparedness advice for those in Hurricane Irene’s path.

Speaking with Martin Bashir, Nagin gave government agencies and their leaders high marks for their preparations. But he said only time will tell if the public follows their instructions.

“[I] think they’re doing an excellent job of alerting the public, which is one of the main things you need to do. One of the problems they’re having on the East Coast is that they have not experienced a storm like this in so long, so there are going to be many people who may not heed the warnings, or may move too late to try and evacuate. And that is when the drama will unfold.”

Nagin didn’t deny that he made some errors with Katrina in 2005. But he put much of the blame on New Orleanians themselves:

“Well, I would tell you this, Martin: It was a historic, catastrophic event … “[N]ow that I have had a chance to really go back and take a look, there are a number of things that I think that I could have done better. But in an evacuation situation where a catastrophic storm is approaching, the leader has one responsibility, but also the citizen has a responsibility to heed the warnings and act appropriately.”

My second lame press trick of the Hurricane coverage was how Geraldo Rivera couldn’t suppress his disappointment that there wasn’t more mayhem and death.  Every time I tried to find something on TV other than hurricane coverage, I would eventually see Geraldo.  The look on his face said “Damn! It’s empty again!!” every time I saw him.

Number three is up there on the Youtube.  That’s the Sea Foam covered Tucker Barnes in Ocean City telling us how he smells while reporting because he’s taking a sea foam shower.  If it doesn’t smell great and it’s coming in during flooding, chances are you don’t really want to be covered in it.
Number four is Howard Kurtz’s pronouncements that are just lame by definition:  “Cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon”.  No Howard, they were utterly swept away because it’s always all about them and this was doubly so.

The fact that New York, home to the nation’s top news outlets, was directly in the storm’s path clearly fed this story-on-steroids. Does anyone seriously believe the hurricane would have drawn the same level of coverage if it had been bearing down on, say, Ft. Lauderdale?

The symbiotic relationship between television and local officials played a huge role. Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who was all over television on Sunday morning, had drawn saturation coverage with his blunt warnings to “get the hell off the beach.” New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who ordered evacuations of low-lying areas, has been a constant presence. President Obama and FEMA officials made sure to generate their share of news as well.

These officials have a responsibility to plan for worst-case scenarios, of course, but something more blatantly political is at work. Mayors and governors need to be seen as on top of the crisis, which means being visible on the tube. No one wants to be the next Ray Nagin or Heckuva Job Brownie, looking disorganized after Katrina. A badly handled snowstorm has contributed to more than one mayor’s defeat.

The blizzard of press conferences, in turn, enable the networks to keep their “Breaking News” banners up and furnished a sense of drama for a story that otherwise consisted of reporters on streets where the hurricane was expected to strike and weather experts with their maps in climate-controlled studios.

All I can say is that we’re lucky there is better stuff on the internet these days.  Otherwise, no one on the east coast would’ve probably gotten some real information at all.

This is an open thread, so have at it!!!