Read More of the Same Day's Blog

It was not exactly a guilty conscience. But at least the death of a trio of stormchasers over the weekend, when a tornado in Oklahoma turned on its pursuers, prompted sober reflection. There had been 64 separate reports on tornadoes on the three nightly newscasts in the month of May alone. Clearly, the networks' awestruck fascination with nature's fury shares the same mentality with the adrenaline-pumped excitement that inspires stormchasing. Perhaps it even facilitates it. Scores of chasing teams now risk their lives in Tornado Alley and this particular trio -- National Geographic Explorer's Tom Samaras, Paul Samaras, and Carl Young -- lost theirs. None of the newscasts led with the trio's deaths, but the three somber features, reflecting on lessons learned, made stormchasing the Story of the Day.

NBC's Tom Costello was most direct at pointing the finger at television news. He showed us the van belonging to Mike Bettes' crew at the Weather Channel, NBC's sibling network, tossed 200 yards by a twister. Costello noted that the lure of television money for extreme twister video has been one incentive for thrillseekers to join the chase. On CBS, Anna Werner cited the 1996 Hollywood movie Twister as the inspiration that attracted so many more amateurs and tourists to Tornado Alley. Ginger Zee, a stormchaser herself and a protégée of Samaras, was both emphatic and defensive on ABC. Zee insisted that the three died as professional meteorologists, dedicated men of science, not reckless adventurers.

Undeterred by the deaths of those covering natural disasters, all three newscasts continued in the same vein. NBC's Katy Tur surveyed the damage from Oklahoma's storms and flash floods, with a death toll of 18. CBS' Kelly Garcia and NBC's Diana Alvear both donned yellow firefighting capes on the frontlines of wildfires around Lake Hughes, near Lancaster Cal. And ABC assigned its lead to Alex Perez for a national roundup of weather porn video: fallen wind turbines, flash floods, sinkholes, wildfires, lightning -- and frightened major leaguers in a thunderstruck dugout.

NBC and CBS both managed to drag themselves away from the weather to select political stories for their leads. From Capitol Hill, CBS' Nancy Cordes monitored House hearings into waste-fraud-abuse at the Internal Revenue Service. NBC was the only newscast to assign a correspondent to the Supreme Court decision allowing police to extract a DNA sample from everyone they arrest for a serious crime. Pete Williams came up with the scary statistic that by the age of 23, one third of the entire population has had the experience of being arrested for one reason or another.
Andrew Tyndall 6/5/13 1:01:26 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report