Not Sufficiently the News

This morning, before the sun had risen on the west coast and twenty-four hours before hurricane Rita was expected to hit land, there was already a slickered and capped reporter in New Orleans fighting the wind and rain.

I just don't get it.

I know people consider me insensitive and calloused, perhaps even uncaring, but they're missing the point. The absurdity of standing someone on a corner in the midst of a hurricane has nothing to do with news and is ridiculous. Hurricanes are far too large to cover from a street corner, and no one -- not even me -- can ad lib for thirty seconds without sounding like an idiot.

I expect tomorrow will bring a massive, cataclysmic storm and will destroy many lives and buildings. That's horrible.

It will also bring silly looking and acting people showing us exactly what we'd expect to see. I predict there will be shots of street signs flapping in the wind, of trees bending and roof being peeled away. None of that is news, it's what happens when a hurricane hits.

Also, since there won't be any sense of the scope of the disaster, reporters will ramble on about the one or two little things they see and treat those as if they were news. Not until the helicopters can fly and the extent of the damage surveyed will we know anything, but that won't stop the flow of dribble.

If there was a purpose to having someone stand in a parking lot and be whipped by the wind and rain, we've already seen that. There's no news in seeing some poor shmuck huddled behind a trash can or acting foolishly brave, but we'll see them, nonetheless, pretending to be serious and important.

And I'll probably laugh. They look so dumb out there.