Idiot Reporters Standing Out In Irene Calling People Idiots For...Standing Out In Irene

I'm trying to find someone with an embedable video but we've all seen it...a reporter standing on a wind and rain swept street or beach telling everyone else how stupid it would be for them to be out in this stuff. Apparently the reality of the disconnect between what they are doing and what they are saying never hits them. Occasionally a piece of flying debris does hit them but never reality.

Well, you know who you have to thank for this particular genre of "reporting"? Dan Rather.

Rather's career moved to a national level thanks to a terrible tropical storm. In September 1961, Hurricane Carla headed toward the American coastline along the Gulf of Mexico. It hit at full force near Galveston, Texas, and became one of the worst storms ever to reach the U.S. mainland. Rather and his team were the only live television news source broadcasting from Galveston when Carla hit, and he delivered one of his reports by hanging onto a palm tree. Rather also persuaded the director of the local weather-reporting station to let his crew put a television camera in front of the radar screen, which tracked storms from high above Earth's atmosphere. "That day," noted Cartwright, "viewers saw something they had never seen on live television: the image of a four-hundred-mile-wide hurricane superimposed over a map of the Texas Gulf Coast. The coverage spurred a mass evacuation of the coast and probably saved thousands of lives."

Rather's fearless reporting earned the attention of CBS executives in New York City and forever earned him the nickname "Hurricane Dan" among his professional colleagues in the media. Shortly after Hurricane Carla, he was promoted to serve as the network's national news correspondent for its southwestern bureau, which included several southern U.S. states as well as Mexico and Central America. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served 1961–63) was assassinated

I don't have much of an update on Irene. I am watching the local Norfolk, VA station and they are saying the storm is basically stalling over them. That's really, really bad news for them obviously.What little forward movement they are seeing there is pretty much due north as opposed to the expected east of north. Now that the storm has made landfall, we'll see how the tracking models hold up or are modified.

If you're anywhere in NY State, you can check out this large, slow loading (you've been warned) but helpful map of watches/warnings/evacuations.

Don't get cocky if it looks like the storm is getting weaker or moving away...it's still plenty big and strong enough to kill you dead. Stay safe morons.

This is also a cool site that lets you track the storm and warnings.

Via Tami in the comments...not a hurricane story but definitely a weather related stupid reporter trick.

posted by DrewM. at 01:04 PM

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