Despite a killer deadline yesterday, I found myself intermittently watching a real killer named Sandy. DirecTV set up a special channel that hopped around from local station to local station in the path of the event some called Frankenstorm. It was an interesting way to watch TV news with the finger of some stranger somewhere on my remote. Whenever it would get dull or repetitive on one channel, they'd just switch to another.
I tried watching that channel this morning because it's too sad — a lot of reporters out in the field showing us devastation and asking people, "How does it feel to lose everything?" I wish TV news wouldn't do that. I know it's part of the story but it's the part of the story we all know and understand and don't need to see played out over and over. There are no unique answers and I often feel that the news crews are there to exploit suffering and to maybe get in the way of things. Those people have enough to think about today without having microphones thrust at them.
Some of the news coverage yesterday seemed helpful and at times, heroic. A lot of it seemed needlessly dramatic — reporters standing in harm's way, telling us that if we had a lick o' sense, we wouldn't be where they are. Then they'd give us information that could more easily have been dispensed from inside any newsroom with a good roof. At some point, it stops being eyewitness news and becomes a stunt show. I sensed that the person at DirecTV changing channels for me sometimes felt that way and would opt to leave the channel risking its reporters' lives and go in search of one offering useful data.
But mostly, I turned it off myself and tried to get back to the script that had to be written before bedtime, the one that pushed that bedtime past 4 AM. It was tough because I found myself thinking over and over: This kind of thing happens and will happen again. There must be a way we can conserve more resources for these moments. And maybe since even the most extreme deniers of Climate Change did listen to the nation's most prominent meteorologists about what Hurricane Sandy would do, and since those meteorologists were dead-on right, maybe we should all be listening to what those meteorologists think about Climate Change.