PressEthic

This article in Newsweek is a candid commentary on the somewhat dramatized television reporting on hurricanes this year.

In every storm your intrepid reporter will be standing outside in some nifty-looking rain slicker getting pelted in the face and knocked around in the wind. They’ll probably offer a few insights—comparing how wet they are right now versus 11 minutes ago or, if they’re really good, telling you what direction the wind is coming from.

On the one hand it is not completely fair to blame the networks for such coverage, because that is exactly what keeps the audience glued to the television screen. However, the problem occurs when it becomes difficult to distinguish between prime time drama and breaking news.

But real people and real reporting are obviously not the point. This is news for show, not for information. News, and especially TV news, has long been going the way of infotainment, and hurricane coverage has become a way to sex-up the broadcast with Hollywood-like special effects.

The media did some really good work during Katrina, and it would be unfair to completely discredit television coverage of hurricanes as dramatized. Peyser has been a bit too hard on television reporters. It’s really quite unfair to say that Anderson Cooper has turned himself into ‘another hurricane whore’ based on one incident. There is after all an essential element of danger and sensation about natural disasters that tends to be an inherent part of the coverage.

I do agree with the writer to some extent, in that these are real disasters and problems, and juicing them up to look like scenes from Twister takes away from the credibility of the network. But, it’s unfair to discredit them completely based on a few extreme incidents like Michelle Kosinski’s canoe disaster. That was definitely in a category of it's own.