Dumbing Down of the United States: Weather Edition.

    I have never understood why weather reporters feel the need to stand out in the wind and rain to tell us that heavy winds and rain are bad. The head of the Hurricane Center sits by a video console and tells us what is about to happen. He imparts much more useful information while remaining dry.

    Is the American public so stupid that they require these unnecessary and silly visual skits?

    For your entertainment pleasure, a link to an article at the Daily Beast by Alex Berg with windswept reporters including a hilarious Al Roker video.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/26/al-roker-cnn-weather-ch...

    Comments

    You pretty much answer your own question, but it isn't so much that the viewers are stupid.  It is the need of the broadcaster to maintain visual interest.  In this age of cultural ADD if they don't have a picture they, in essence, don't have a story at all.  The competition between stations is so idiotically out of control they push themselves into this corner of having to become entertainers instead of being focused on the news or, as in this case, the weather.

     

    They all have the same information and despite the demands of the round the clock reporting they like to do there are very, very few new developments so really all they've got to fill air time is visuals to spice up the endlessly repeated same few facts.  For instance, the only real "news" about the hurricane in the past 36 hours is that it is diminishing in force.  That doesn't fit their story line so they are redoubling their efforts to find exciting and dramatic pictures that will keep the audience tuned in while they minimize the real news which is that the calamity is not likely to become what our Chicken Little media has put so many in hysterics about.


    Maybe all newscasters should start broadcasting under eye-catching conditions. Pundits too. The McLaughlin Group can argue on a storm-tossed ship in a shark-infested sea. The View can do a live volcano. Meet the Press can meet somewhere scary like Tripoli, Mogadishu, or Detroit.


    Lovely imagery.

    Can we go ahead and put the McLaughlin Group in the shark cage? Give 'em a dip? Maybe a Steve Irwin moment or two?


    George,

    I am standing here on a street in Working Class America, and it is really an amazing sight!  As we pan the cameras around, you can see that there is an incredible disaster unfolding.  There are unemployed people everywhere!  The levees of employment in working America appear to have given way, and jobless people are now gushing out their former workplaces and pouring into the street.

    I can barely stay on my feet as I am buffeted by the swirling winds of evaporating dreams and dissolving families, and the drenching tears of loss and disappointment and quiet desperation!   Just a short time ago, the spot I'm standing on was built up with optimism and dignity, but now everywhere I look all I see is humiliation.  The scale of the destruction is awesome!

    I don't think you can really get a true sense back in the studio, George, of the destructive power of these gusts of adversity, failure and loss!  That's because you and all of the people working around you are well-sheltered.  You are high and dry under the roof of the protected and affluent parts of America, those temperate and pleasant places where Tiffany's just had a record quarter and where the stock market continues to do well for the upper half of Americans who own stocks; where nobody is ever too dirty, ugly, brown-colored or uncouth; where nobody is ever too tastelessly fat, or eats too much gluten; where nobody is guilty of the criminal offense of working mostly with their hands or backs, and of not having gone to college.  I wish I were there in the warm studio with you George!

    The truly amazing thing about this powerful Category 4 unemployment event, George, is that the Federal emergency teams are nowhere to be seen!  Nobody has heard anything from either Congress or the White House about emergency relief or getting the country working again.  This appears to be a government failure of epic proportions!   I wouldn't believe it if I weren't't seeing it with my own eyes!

    I did run across two federal officials earlier today, and do you know what they told me?  They said that Job One in Washington was concluding a bipartisan bargain that makes sure government actually does less than it is doing now.  Can you believe it!!?


    I hereby award DanK the Daily Comment of the Week Award for this here Dagblog site, given to all of him from all of me.

    TRUTH is so hard to get one's hands around and you have done it!

    WELL DONE


    That was brilliant.


    Totally implausible. Way too dangerous for the journalists.


    I wish someone like Jack Cafferty would read this and spread the word. Your comment should go viral.  


    Thanks everyone.  I just posted it on Facebook.


    Great piece, Dan. 


    Bravo!

    Of course, one of the problems with our current depression is that because there are so visual signs of the suffering of the unemployed that can be videoed they just don't cover the subject except to note it as a statistic when the monthyl bad news comes out.  They've alredy covered the foreclosure signs in front yards and done the interviews with people who were laid off two years ago and more so now the problem is gone because they can't film any "action" footage.  That is why the unemployed need to get out on the streets and make some noise instead of silently suffering to the point of total collapse as is the case with so many who not only lose their homes, but their families as well.


    Now there's an idea!  But of course FOX Noise is the leader in this area putting as many attractive blond females on camera as possible.  The next step will be to start having a video equivalent of Page 3 girls.  I've no doubt that sort of thing is headed our way sooner than most might imagine.  It's all and only and always about $$$$$$!


    Page 3 girls .. I, for one, welcome, etc

    Observing webcams in VA and NC, this does not appear to be the hurricane of the century. Surf looks heavy in Virginia Beach but the breakers aren't reaching beyond the beach itself. Katrina drove water miles inland. The heavy rain will likely cause serious flooding along rivers, in mountain valleys, roads and low lying areas, causing washouts of roads, power outages, trees down and mud flows.


    I think that this protocol by the weather experts and the Weather Channel demonstrate a covert attempt to discuss our atmospheric problems with extraterrestrials.

    Now this may seem silly on its face, but think about it.

    If all our weather came from blog like sites; someone on the outside might not be able to discern what was reality and what was blogging!

    http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/08/26/304951/bachmann-americans-will-never-elect-a-republican-if-health-law-is-implemented/

    Now Beckerhead for instance tells us that God is showing us the way with earthquakes and hurricanes affecting our Eastern Coasts!

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/26/glenn-beck-hurricane-iren_n_938411.html

    Well the Lord works in strange ways and he is using aliens to give us some direction!

    the end

     


    I thought if we just listened to Beck or Limbaugh we would achieve salvation?


    Yes, I have been wrong all along.

    Close to three thousand or eight thousand folks took the time to pay 20 grand to go to THE HOLY PLACE and see him split the Red Sea and such.

    http://mediamatters.org/blog/201108250015

    I mean think about it, three thousand people paying 20 grand (except for Lieberman who had to attend a Bar Mitzvah), I mean think of the bucks involved!

    And this guy along with michele and perry and paul and mitt and all the rest talk to God every day!

    When was the last time Biden spoke with Our Lord & Savior?

    Oh well, I got a message from God and he told me that the Green Screen was sacred!

    That's all I got!


    New favorite activity:

    Watching anxious, breathless weathercritters braced against the merciless wind, shouting incoherently into overdriven microphones while ordinary citizens stroll along the background sidewalks or cavort in the background surf.


    They are competing for "The Rather" awarded to the broadcaster whose "remote" from the edge of a wind riled ocean is delivered at the most acute angle to the horizon, bespeaking heroism in the face of unspeakable wind velocity...


    I remember one shot of a female reporter in a canoe talking about the water damage. In the background, a guy with hip boots walked through waist high water. A great TV moment.


    BTW, what happened to Libya? Did Irene eat that too?


    In all the videos the camera was rock steady. As long as that is the case we can be sure that life will go on pretty much as normal, America, which gets its information and marching orders from the tube, will sit enthralled and watch TV personalities demonstrate that they do not have the good sense to come in out of the rain when it would only take a few steps to do so.


    This really has been a perfect storm, as a Category 1 hurricane barrels into the media monstrosities and delicate and slightly hysterical sensibilities of Northeast urbanites to produce an emotional disaster of biblical proportions.


    It is difficult to convey the extent of the devastation, here in Brooklyn.


    Why TV news is addicted to weather porn

    In case you thought the TV news business wasn't well aware that it thrives on fear, a local anchor confirmed it during Hurricane Irene coverage yesterday morning. Chuck Scarborough, the anchor of local New York affiliate WNBC, was talking about the importance of evacuating the coastal Manhattan neighborhood of Battery Park City even though, by that point in the Irene narrative, it was clear that the storm wasn't going to hit the city as hard as some experts originally thought. When Scarborough finished talking, his guest, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, joked, "I thought I was just listening to the Oracle of Doom."

    "We're in the news business," Scarborough said wryly. "We deal in doom."

     


    It's not news. It's infotainment.


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