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Don’t Blame Jim Cantore

 

 

Here’s something I’m tired of:

 

A couple of times now, I’ve heard people criticize the press for making hurricane coverage a big Hollywood spectacle. I’ve even heard that they should be held accountable for the fact that too many people refuse to get out of the paths of these killer storms. Supposedly, when we see these reporters being blown about in the midst of a major storm, it convinces people that they can stand the storm too.

 

This is stupid. These are paid commentators with nothing better to talk about.

 

The first thing you have to remember about the press is that they’re driven by ratings, and ratings are driven by audiences. Their job is to show us what we want to see—when they do that, they make money. This capitalist reality often leaves very important, but less attractive stories unreported—like the story of why tens of thousands of people were too poor to afford a way out of New Orleans before Katrina hit. But what are they supposed to do? Take us on a tour of a chair factory while there’s a category five hurricane bearing down on the Gulf coast? They’re not paid to make us a less morbid society. They’re paid to supply the society we are with the information we want. Don’t blame the symptom—blame the cause.

 

And in this case, just don’t blame anybody, because there’s no case here. Look, reporters go to dangerous places all the time. That’s their job. They give us the perspective that we could not ourselves obtain. We’re smart enough to understand they’re there because it’s dangerous. I mean you don’t see people lining up to take vacations in Iraq because reporters are there.

 

No doubt that there are plenty of thrill-seekers among us—people who push themselves as near to the edge of death as possible simply for the fun of it. Some of the reporters who put themselves in harm’s way to get a first-hand look at these hurricanes are among them. For these folks, the sight of Jim Cantore reporting live from a coast is reason enough to load up the surfboards and get rolling. But these people are not the majority. They’re thrill-seekers and they make their choices at their own risk. The majority of people leave, and the majority who don’t have reasons not involving Jim Cantore or any other reporter. Either they can’t leave, because they don’t have the means, or they won’t leave, because they want to protect their property or their past experience with hurricanes leads them to believe they can handle what’s coming. They don’t stay because they saw reporters on TV telling them “it’s going to be really awful—please leave now.” That is just stupid.

 

And if Katrina showed us anything, it’s that hurricanes deserve all the bombastic reporting they receive. Every hurricane is dangerous. Every one is a potentially life-threatening event, the implications of which need to be disseminated to the pubic fully and openly, with as much drama as possible. What’s the argument here? That people became complacent because the media made too much of deadly storms that turned out not to kill that many people?

 

It’s true that you never know what a storm is going to do until it’s done. There are always worst-case scenarios, and most of the time they don’t come true. But sometimes they do. That’s why you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario every single time. That’s why those dire predictions are always dead-on, even when they don’t come true.

 

That’s the lesson of Katrina. Most land-falling hurricanes aren’t that deadly, but many of them have the potential to be, and all of them need to be taken seriously. They all deserve the coverage Katrina got. People may have become complacent in a “boy who cried wolf” syndrome, but that’s only because we failed to understand just how right the media was about these things.

 

The boy cried wolf when there was no wolf. Hurricanes are different. More like this: A man comes by your house several times a year and points a gun at your head. You know for a fact that there’s only one bullet in the gun—that there’s only a one in six chance that you’re in actual danger. But if you have any sense whatsoever, you’re going to duck every time you see him on your doorstep.

 

That’s the lesson of Katrina. Hurricanes deserve the coverage they get. The press should be lauded for it. It’s not their coverage that’s wrong—it’s our perspective on it.

 

 

 

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