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This is what I mean when I say that this is not the type of story the nightly newscasts are designed to handle:
The idea of airing a newscast in a once-in-every-24-hour cycle is that it gives correspondents time to think through the implications of each day's stories, to collect the best soundbites, to edit the events properly, to write the story clearly, to separate the essential from the incidental, to discover that special vignette or anecdotal image that summarizes the whole.
In all, this is useful, if anachronistic journalism. It means that, for important stories, we viewers can get on with our lives for the remainder of the day, secure in the knowledge that the latest breaking developments are being monitored, evaluated and filtered by professionals on our behalf.
In the wake of the tornado in Moore, the newshour arrived too soon, the situation on the ground was changing too rapidly, and the logistics of reaching the scene to start reporting were too time-consuming, for the network newscasts to differentiate themselves from the non-stop, non-reflexive style of breaking news on the 24-hour cable channels.
So if, in the first hours after the devastation, you were looking for considered, properly-reported stories on, say, the role of global warming in exacerbating severe weather, or the wisdom of zoning laws that allow single-family and trailer homes in a well-traveled path of Tornado Alley, or the costs and subsidies of storm shelters for working class residents, then you were bound to be disappointed.
The only category of expertise, able to take the long view, that was immediately available for the newscasts was meteorology. Thus…
NBC went to two correspondents from its sibling network, the Weather Channel, who were already deployed in the field in Oklahoma to cover earlier, smaller twisters: Mike Bettes and Mike Seidel.
The morning shows were also represented: Sam Champion of ABC's Good Morning America, who was already in Shawnee; Al Roker of NBC's Today, who filed briefly from Moore.
By remote, CBS relied on forecaster Dave Bernard from WFOR-TV, its Miami affiliate. NBC went to Weather Channel headquarters in Atlanta where Chris Warren offered detailed, expert radar analysis.
And from ABC's xTreme Weather Team, Ginger Zee showed off her stormchasing Dominator trucks complete with footage from tvnweather.com. Of all the TV meteorologists, Zee is the true weather-porn star.
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