TELEVISION'S TAKE ON WIND STORMS
September 26, 2005

      MIAMI _ One of television's most difficult dilemmas is how to shoot something that you can't see. With hurricanes, it is about filming wind force, and that can require a bit of creativity.

      Without doubt, Hurricanes Rita and Katrina caused an appalling amount of damage and loss of life, but television can stretch that reality to give the impression that the devastation is even greater.

      But what I want to discuss here is how television _ particularly local TV stations _ is not always the best source of information about what is going on.

      Katrina and Rita struck close to where I live near Miami and it was impossible to avoid the never-ending coverage from local channels reporting on the hurricanes' progress and possible effects. In both cases, the damages in Florida were absolutely minimal compared to those in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. But there were reporters in Miami who almost went as far as suggesting that the world, as we know it, was about to end.

      When TV reporters do a good job, they report correct and timely information and save lives; when they do a poor job, they create panic, and exploit the crisis to stand above the competition and increase their ratings.

      I have even seen some reporters, mostly on local stations, go to the ludicrous extreme of pretending they are being blown off their spot by the wind while right behind them a cyclist calmly pedals by or a man reads an unruffled magazine.

      Forecasting the force and direction of hurricanes is an inaccurate art. Even the best-trained meteorologists can be wrong (though afterward they are able to explain how and why they were mistaken). The worst ones are those who are not meteorologically trained but can come up with weather warnings to capture audience and deter people from switching channels.

      Exaggeration, sensationalism and inaccuracy are often journalistic recourses when natural phenomena such as hurricanes are reported. A journalist's error in such an event can erode his credibility and expose thousands of people to serious danger. Next time that weatherman _ or weather "magician" _ forecasts something, nobody will believe him.

      Just as bad TV journalism can be measured by the loss of human life, good journalism can actually save lives.

      It was journalists who first reported the terrible conditions at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center.

      The news that victims of Katrina hadn't received aid for days was reported by journalists.

      The filming and reporting of bodies floating in the flood waters, which eventually prodded the government into action, were done by journalists.

      Without those reports, the death toll might have been even higher. Without journalists' scathing stories, the incompetent Michael Brown would still be heading FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

      The media's scorching criticism of President George W. Bush and his administration for their slow and inefficient response to brutal hurricane Katrina forced it to change its response when Rita was closing in. And then, instead of continuing his vacation, Bush rushed to Texas to wait for the arrival of powerful hurricane Rita, and thus elicited the image that this time, he was in charge of prevention, rescue and restoration operations.

      For Bush, it was a second chance to look like the leader he was after 9/11, an opportunity he wasn't going to waste. The catastrophe caused by Rita gave the president the jump-start he needed to patch up his seriously injured popularity, which had plummeted after the Katrina debacle.

      The nature of TV news is to focus on the extraordinary, and to give a slice of reality as if it were the whole. That is why we showed drowned people, lost children, flooded houses in New Orleans and the destruction caused by Rita _ but not the buildings still standing, people going to work in the devastated regions, the music that refuses to die in New Orleans' famed French Quarter, and the officials who went about doing fine jobs.

      Inevitably, it's the bad news that gets shown in a newscast. But then, with time, we need to put things in context, whatever effect that may have on ratings. But this has been missing.

      Virtually nothing has been said on television, for example, about America's refusal to sign the so called Kyoto Protocol. It is the only international environmental protection agreement that exists to reduce toxic emissions that could cause the warming of the planet, the seas and indirectly increase hurricane frequency and intensity.

      Rita and Katrina, two of the most powerful hurricanes of the last decades, aren't science fiction and may be partly of our own making. Over and over again TV stations broadcast images of the long lines of traffic, many minivans and SUVs, fleeing Houston and Galveston before the onslaught of Rita.

      The two hurricanes affected oil production and paralyzed many gasoline refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. But there was little analysis to highlight U.S. dependency on the world's oil which is worsened by those same SUVs that have such low gas mileage.

      Everyone has learned from Katrina and Rita, even we TV journalists. And the lessons are that the gale-force winds we see on TV are not always what they seem, and that the public's love affair with gas-guzzling vehicles is placing the energy future of the nation in danger.