“If it bleeds it leads” used to be and still is the lead on the evening news. But a close second is weather related footage. Is it because weather events are becoming much more common and violent, or might it be the easy availability of smart phones and digital cameras that allow easy uploading to the internet?
Come on folks, it’s today’s technology that makes it seem that weather is so much more extreme and dangerous. Back 20 years or earlier, it would rate a short paragraph on the back page of the daily rag next to the nation’s temperature readings.
Instant info and news make the data quickly and easily available where a decade or two ago things didn’t seem as bad because the info wasn’t flashed globally within minutes of occurring. Quicker reporting tends to be a false sense of doom. Not only that, but when things are made available so quickly, erroneous “facts” are spewed and once out of the bag, they are hard to get back under control. Front page “facts” are corrected later in section D page 8 in small font.