Media Rant time

I really wish I wasn’t a journalist sometimes, because what I am seeing for passing for news reporting these just about makes me want to puke.

The blame game in this coverage is bovine scatology of the first order.

Now, understand folks, I spent about 30 years working in the news rooms of newspapers. Some of it I was reporting, some of it I was editing … but I will say this: the crap, and that is being generous, that was put up by CNN about the storm in the South was about the poorest example I have seen coming out of that once respected cable news outlet.

First of all, I lived in the Atlanta area for six years, and in the South generally for the better part of 25 years, and so I am quite familiar with what is paralyzing the region … as the saying goes, been there, done that … got the T-shirt, and lost it – a number of times. I doubt, honestly, that any folks up in Yankeedom (that is anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line or the Ohio River) probably would have done much better on the first big blizzard of the year, but then they do get a lot more practice.

I can tell you that on a good day that the traffic jams in Atlanta are epic, and the drivers worse (I had a Jaguar coupe try to swap paint with my old Ford pickup truck at 75 mph on an Atlanta freeway one day – and only because I grew up driving the Southern California freeways, we didn’t).

No, Southerners do not know how to drive on snow and ice, and for most years they don’t have to. On those few occasions that it happens, well, you are seeing the results.

For that reason, which my Canadian wife got real hoots out of, at the first snowflake, towns, schools and just about everything else closes up shop – and people all run to the grocery store to stock up on milk and bread. Don’t ask me why, but it is a Southern thing.

I have no doubt that the state, counties, cities and towns affected by this storm had emergency plans in place to deal with it … but when the rubber hits the road, the plans go in the bit buck about as fast as you can say snow flake or especially ice crystal.

Add to that the track record for meteorologists is nothing to write home about. For example, I now reside on the coast of Maine and the weather forecast has called for snow or some other type of frozen precipitation for just about every other day for the past week and I ain’t seen nary a flake yet … oh, there were a few drops of mist on the windshield when I went to the doctor’s on Monday, but not enough even to make the pavement damp.

So, between weather forecasters who can’t get their act together and a storm that comes along maybe once a decade – if not once a generation – and you expect things to go normally?

Now, if  you are journalist, you report what is happening, and you don’t go pillorying every government official you can put your microphone and camera in front of for failing to get everybody home.

Reminds me  of Hurricane Floyd in 1999. (Background on Floyd) As Floyd skirted up the East Coast, the governor of South Carolina, as a precaution, ordered all the people in the counties east of I-95 to evacuate. It turned into a royal mess with it taking people 10-12 hours to cover normally is a 90 minute to two hour drive.

And then … Floyd didn’t even come ashore in South Carolina and just brushed the North Carolina Cape Hatteras area before finally slamming in the Virginia and Maryland.

Now, what do you think people thought of evacuations then?

So, all you people who are pointing fingers at the folks down South: Bless your pea-picking little hearts, but you weren’t there and I have heard from folks from up North of the Border who were there and were saying that they doubted it would have been handled any better.

Actually, rather than try to blame somebody, CNN could have been going out and reporting actually what was happening, which probably was some really great human interest stories about people pitching in and helping one another when the going was tough and at its worst.

Like the teachers and school administrators who made the brave choice to hunker down in their schools with their students and do their best to make them feel safe and comfortable.

Or those police officers and firefighters going out and doing their jobs, despite the conditions. And yes, even those much maligned state and county road crews who had to put that strange and little used equipment to use out there on highways not even a snowshoe hare would dare to travel.

I have lived through a slew of those ice storms, and believe me, I will take the 30 inch snowfall we had here in Maine over them anytime.

Anyway, suffice it to say, I think CNN’s coverage sucked the big green weenie and what little respect I had for the institution slipped even further into the john.