I am at a crossroads.
First with my Sopranos entry the other day, and now with this, I feel like I am just piling on. I feel like I am taking the easy way out. On the other hand, if I don’t touch on this subject, my four loyal non-family readers will wonder if I’m still alive.
I am talking about the latest Storm of the Century… aka “Death From a Cloud”, “Wet Rapture” or “Noah II”.
The prelude to the massive drizzle that happened in West Allis at about 11:00 PM last night (June 7th) can be described as no less than IRRESPONSIBLE. Ohmigosh, if I could quickly and easily link to every overblown, outrageous and whiney comment I heard on TV and the radio over the last 36 hours, it would take too long to follow the links and the message would be lost.
First, the making of news - I don’t have a journalism background, but aren’t news outlets supposed to report the news, not create it? Storms happen in summer. When the air is humid, the cold front is approaching and the sun is baking it all, there are often storms. Why, exactly, was this news for two days? (Big ol’ distracting side note here… in some of my first blog entries from March, I complained about how the local news has lost credibility. As a matter of fact, WITI’s Jen Lada responded and said something about if I state something publicly, I need to be responsible for it. Well, guess what. Local news didn’t shoot itself in the foot last night, it took a 9mm Glock and pointed it through the roof of its mouth… then squeezed. I said it, I mean it, and I stand behind it). I can no longer call it the local news. It is now the local “bleeding heart or scare people needlessly entertainment program”.
TV made this storm something it wasn’t. It wasn’t the end of the earth. It wasn’t going to kill 2000 people. It wasn’t going to change life for the masses. This storm was what it ended up being… a storm that could have been dangerous for some people. Now granted, it was - in Central Wisconsin. It can be fairly said that it is always difficult to tell exactly where the severe storms would hit, but even the tornado that did touch down affected less than .25% of the State of Wisconsin.
Without checking (because I am jamming this post in during a lunch hour at work), I’d bet that the number of people that have died in SE Wisconsin over the last 25 years from tornadic activity is less than 10. That is less than one person per year for the last quarter century in a viewing area of 1.5 million. Now, what are the odds that any one storm will kill YOU?
You know, warnings are fine and dandy. Ring the civil defense sirens, run the crawl on the bottom of the TV screen, let WTMJ-AM’s Jonathan Greene take a call from Sylvia in Franklin that her cat is under the bed and the wing nut from her weather vane came off due to a wind gust. But to give one minute’s worth of TV air time to this storm than any other summer storm was IRRESPONSIBLE.
(Now, Tim Cuprisin will love this part).
Why does TV feel the need to over dramatize and scare the hell out of its viewers? Because viewers are stupid enough to tell them that we want them to. It is all about ratings. When you watch the scary, scary weather (be it in winter or summer), bells and whistles go off in the TV studios. Ad execs call the sponsors and get more money. Station VPs sees revenue shoot through the roof after a storm and conclude that if that’s what makes money, then give the fools what they want. (FYI, that’s why we are stuck with American Idol, Survivor, and Paris Hilton; this nonsense isn’t real – it is so heavily edited and massaged for public consumption that there is no longer any semblance of reality – but people watch it.)
Second, the reaction of the news - OK. The four local weather-hypers have been telling us about the impending doom of civilization for three days. What do well-meaning but shortsighted people do? THEY BELIEVE THEM (cue the long, hysterical scream). People, when a weather-hyper gets it wrong, they always - always say that “forecasting weather is an inexact science”. So why do local leaders go mental about feeding this fallacy that the world is coming to an end?
Q -What in the world was Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett doing with a news conference yesterday afternoon?
A - Face time on the local news (recently re-branded a few paragraphs ago as “the local bleeding heart or scare people needlessly entertainment program”.)
When “weather-mania hits” (remember it isn’t about science because forecasting weather is an inexact science), then fools watch TV in droves. What else can leaders think? Barrett now has most of the population in the palm of his hands (ratings say so). Now you have a weather-hyper AND a mayor telling you that you can run but you can’t hide. If you are the type of person to be glued to your set during a “weather emergency”, you are certainly one to think that if the Mayor is speaking, this is some h
