Channel surfing through idiotic Storm Alerts


July 15, 2003

I have to admit that when I was in Reno, I absolutely despised the TV news, as a whole.

(First, I should concede a bias: I am a print journalism guy, and therefore, I believe that newspapers and magazines give issues more in-depth, fuller coverage than the prettied-up talking heads on TV could give in a million years. Having said that, I should also note that TV news folks believe that most print journalists need a bath and a wardrobe update, a point I must concede.)

But now, having lived in two larger cities where the TV news is arguably worse, I have to give props to the folks at Reno's TV news stations.

As my bevy (please, no snickering) of regular readers know, I now live in Tucson, a festive town of 800,000 or so folks about 50 miles from the Mexico border in Southeastern Arizona. Well, we here have just hit the monsoon season, a fun time of year where late afternoon and evening thunderstorms and downpours happen somewhat frequently.

From a TV news standpoint, there are a number of sensible, valuable ways to handle monsoon season. For example, TV news crews could tastefully alert viewers to flooded intersections, traffic problems and lighting-caused fires as they arise.

Sadly, the local TV news has taken these sensible, valuable ideas and covered them with a load of graphics-laden, sensationalist crud. Our news stations are in Full Red Alert, as if Tucson was being attacked by terrorists rather than thunderstorms.

The last couple nights, while watching any of the broadcast network TV stations, I have been assaulted with a series of dramatically named graphics -- Storm Alert, Storm Tracker, etc -- taking up a good portion of the screen, no matter what's on. One station kept showing, over and over, a precipitation radar map of the Tucson area that never seemed to change, superimposed over an episode of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" Another had a huge graphic and a crawl over some silly sitcom.

My favorite example of this lunacy came Sunday night. I was watching "Dateline," which featured a chronologically told story about a murder trial. Just as the story was getting the verdict, the TV news cretins broke in, with a nervous-looking weatherman informing we, the viewing public, that a Severe Storm Advisory was in effect until 8:30.

Well, it was 7:52, meaning that there were 38 whopping minutes of Severe Storm Advisory left. I should also note that the advisory had been issued hours earlier and had been reported by the same TV station already about 850 times.

Thankfully, the station cut back to "Dateline" just in time for the verdict. Had the station not done so, I fear I would have tromped down to the station, regardless of the Severe Storm Advisory, in a lunatic fit, and that someone would have been harmed.

Before I moved to Tucson, I had the pleasure of living in Las Vegas. Now, while Reno and even Tucson have some semblance of an excuse for lacking good TV news coverage because they are both small markets, Las Vegas has no such excuse. It's a Top 50 market by some measures, and you would think that as a result, the stations there could produce compelling, valuable journalism.

You would THINK.

Anyone watching the news in Vegas is left with the impression that the streets are filled with rapists, murderers and other violent criminals, and that nothing else ever happens in the city other than UNLV sports. It was all crime, all the time (with one notable exception -- a station that actually employs a full-time investigative reporter, and a good one at that) mixed in with lame-ass health reports and worthless weather reports (it's hot and windy in Vegas 350 days a year, for pete's sake). Occasionally, someone would blow up an old casino, which the news would cover ad nauseam, just to spice things up a bit.

I literally could not watch the TV news in Vegas without getting cranky because of on the depressing and shallow coverage.

Meanwhile, in Reno, all of the stations -- while being far from perfect -- at least try to cover the news beyond Storm Alerts and crime, at least some of the time. And that's worth applauding.

Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan in exile in Arizona. In between Severe Storm Alerts, he writes this column, which appears here Tuesdays. He can be reached via e-mail at jiboegle@stanfordalumni.org.

1