MEDIA BLITZ

The locust are coming, the locust are coming!

That is what it sounds like on the TV lately, whenever there is a hint of sprinkles in the weather. Get one overcast day, and the crawl comes alive with impending doom!


When hurricane Earl was nearby, about 1,000 miles out to sea, we started getting messages from the weather centers, those phony channel weathermen, and women, trying to get the public excited, and they having some real news to report. Let’s face it, the TV stations have news programs that try to compete with the internet, and are about a day behind, except when it comes to the weather! Then they can compete because of radar. Doppler radar enables the TV stations to give up-to-the-minute tracking of a current event.
It so happened that TLW (The Little Woman) and I had planned a vacation at the time hurricane Earl was supposed to arrive. Being a veteran of watching these weather stations, I know that they will make a mountain, mostly the Alps out of an anthill. The dramatic interruption of a TV show, sometimes a crawl in red running along the bottom of the screen, “Live from the weather center” it goes, all playing on people’s fears. Very rarely does a weather event warrant the excitement the TV stations try to project, and decided I was driving away, because there were too many uncertainties in the reports. The internet and the weather channel seemed to hold off on the doom and gloom, it was the network TV channels that were creating the false excitement. Sure enough, my instincts were correct, we got a few sprinkles on the Garden State Parkway, and nothing else occurred!

I think that Network TV should do away with their so-called newsrooms, and instead put on old movies, or reruns of Gilligan’s Island before they waste their income on non-events and try to compete with the internet for giving us news. Internet news is instantaneous, network news needs a good few hours to produce. The only ones worse than the Networks are the newspapers, their news is generally almost two days old!