Daddy's Katrina Rant

Good television occasionally kills people. What I mean by this is that one reason sane people might elect to ignore mandatory evacuation orders in the face of an oncoming hurricane as powerful as Katrina, say, is what they see on their TVs. And what they see on their TVs are professional meteorologists rushing into – not out of – areas where hurricanes are expected to make landfall. It happened again more recently, with Wilma, just as it happened with Rita, just as it will happen again and again.

As the storms approach, these meteorologists – and other reporters who play the game – have to catch their balance repeatedly as they lean into the wind and speak just under a full shout into their microphones. The winds grow; the rain falls, and the weather experts begin to clutch the sides of buildings while delivering their story. It makes great TV.

It makes less great public service. For these are professional meteorologists, who know the intricacies of wind shifts and storm surge so well that they generally manage to avoid dying while bolstering their employers’ ratings and their own careers. What they do not bolster, however, is a sense of reality among the public that major hurricanes are not to be trifled with – by anyone, under any circumstances.

I haven’t heard a single Katrina survivor say that they chose not to evacuate because of a daredevil weather man. Poverty, we all know, was certainly a bigger factor. But, at least in my view, it was not the only factor. People turn their televisions to cable weather providers like the Weather Channel to help them determine how to proceed. When the weather providers themselves don’t proceed in the right direction it makes TV so good it kills people. As a father, and as a citizen of this fractured land, I would hope ratings would mean less than human lives.