I’ve been watching Fox News today as they have been covering the impact of Hurricane Ivan on the Gulf Coast near Alabama. It is a terrifying storm with winds around 200 kph and driving rain. You can read about the details here
But what got me is that there are Fox News reporters out in the storm covering it. This is insane- trees are being uprooted, debris is flying around left and right, and these guys are OUT IN THE RAIN!
I know reporters will die for a good story, but this is ridiculous. Get inside you idiots!
They aren’t working as hard as CBS are right now. FOX is only covering a hurricane, while CBS are dealing with a shitstorm.
I dunno, Yobbo: shitstorms are pretty disgusting, but a good shower tends to get rid of the smell. It’s embarassing, but forgotten about a week later. Kinda like U.S. journalism, which doesn’t really have a good history of learning from its mistakes:
If [Dan Rather’s forgery blunder] sounds familiar, it’s because the right-wing media does it all the time. In February 2004, for instance, Fox News broadcasters Brit Hume, Sean Hannity, and John Gibson all showed a photo of John Kerry standing next to Jane Fonda on a podium at an anti-Vietnam War rally in the 1970s. It turns out the photo was fake. Did hordes of media critics demand retractions from Hume, Hannity, and Gibson? Of course not. As a result, it seems likely that plenty of voters continue to believe the picture was real. Another example: Hannity, on May 18, said, “The only thing [John Kerry has] been consistent about in his entire career is raising taxes, because he supported tax increases 350 times.” Hannity was using a number produced by the Bush campaign that was arrived at by allowing votes against tax cuts to count as support of a tax increase, and by double-, triple-, or quadruple-counting tax votes in budget bills with multiple parts. Hannity, of course, declined to present this contextual information.
Unlike a real hurricane, where you could always end up with a piece of corro roofing between the eyes at 200 km/h. It’s hard to learn from that mistake.
Bloody scary those things. I was caught in a good sized tropical storm in Florida, and was frightened as hell. Cars were blown off the roads without a problem, signs and trees torn away. It was big enough, a force four would be mindblowing. They have a presence, like an animal or beast, which you feel as they approach. The one i saw had hell written into its black front – it really does speak of it.
Americans just take it all for granted over there. Wake up each day and check the weather, as in, ‘is it deadly today?’. Weather over there has that life or death factor; a daily presence we just don’t have.
And then you get those people who really want to be there:
http://www.stormchaser.com/
Should have put the link on pop-up. Here it is.
Also check out Stormtrack