I told Pete the other day I was ready for a good weather story to follow during the day, a la Hurricane Anyone or an early-season snowstorm. Anything that gets Jim Cantore and crew beaten to death by wind and precipitation is good daytime TV.
The fires are not so much a weather story and definitely lack the needed precipitation factor, but the Weather Channel is a bit confounded by that so they air updates, too. But the winds! Oh, the winds make it weather related...woo-hoo for the WC!
So without the 'round-the-clock fire coverage from the Weather Channel, I get to feed my news appetite with CNN, MSNBC, and the others. See if you haven't been thinking the same things while watching "California Burning":
1. A no-brainer: the press couldn't wait to give these fires their own title. "California Burning" splashed on the screen, complete with animated flames, was the logical choice.
2. At the speed of light, FEMA rushed to spend thousands to accommodate the evacuees at Qualcomm Stadium and other locations. They would do anything to avoid the criticism that Katrina brought them. In fact, they have probably ended up overspending on resources in order to avoid it.
3. Wolf Blitzer is going to implode if he doesn't find out why the fires burn one house and leave its next-door neighbor untouched. Here's a newsflash, Wolf: tornados do the same thing. Move on to another subject (like how you expect us to keep up with your six TV screens).
4. Reporters are actually asking evacuees what their plans are as far as rebuilding if their house is destroyed. WHAT ELSE ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO DO?
5. When a reporter is broadcasting from an area and they say "...this whole town is evacuated; no one should be up here..." It doesn't really make them look very good to be, uh, standing there.
6. This morning my local radio news boasted that theirs was the only reporter in town who went to California to cover the fires. Hmmm, maybe that's because everyone else realizes that people in northeast Oklahoma don't really care about it that much. And there's 847 national news people out there who are already covering it. But good luck trying to report something to us that we haven't already heard.
Oh, well...my persnickety attitude will not prevent me from continuing to watch the coverage. After all, I'm sure those Californians were glued to their TVs when we had our own fires a couple of years ago.
1 comment:
I was definitely thinking about #2. When I read that Bush was sending help to California, I was thinking he's probably trying get the heat lifted off of him from Katrina.
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