Friday morning, I heard an over-caffeinated TV pretty boy breathlessly announce to America that Hurricane Irene, which was being promoted as the mother of all storms, would be one “for the ages.” This hurricane turned tropical storm was a big one, all right. Folks died. Property was destroyed. Outages were widespread. I spent much of Sunday wondering if we'd lose power here in central Maine, killing the sump pump and flooding the basement during torrential rains (didn't happen) or if high winds would send our towering ash tree crashing into the roof of the house (ditto).
But one "for the ages"? More like a storm for this age. Or maybe this year. Or perhaps the month of August. As Howard Kurtz wrote yesterday at The Daily Beast:
Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. “Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,” Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted.
I say this with all due respect to the millions who were left without power, to those communities facing flooding problems, and of course to the families of the 11 people (at last count) who lost their lives in storm-related accidents.
And I take nothing away from the journalists who worked around the clock, many braving the elements, to cover a hurricane that was sweeping its way from North Carolina to New England.
But the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings. Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was to risk driving viewers elsewhere. Websites, too, were running dramatic headlines even as it became apparent that the storm wasn’t as powerful as advertised.
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