Posted on 02/15/2007 5:33:25 PM PST by buccaneer81
SNOW SHOW It’s not a bona fide winter storm until a TV reporter stands in it By Dan Williamson / February 15, 2007
The good news for those watching Channel 10 Tuesday morning was that they would miss the first five minutes and 50 seconds of Dr. Phil. 10TV pre-empted the 10 a.m. program for a special weather update: It was snowing outside.
This was clear from the ticker running on the bottom of the screen, telling which schools, businesses and events would be closed. But the Channel 10 weather team had more to add.
Meteorologist Mike Davis stood in front of a map, showing the storm patterns. Then Heather Pick announced a few more canceled events before kicking it out to Tino Ramos, who was live on the scene in Delaware County.
Strolling around the snow and pointing occasionally at the road, Ramos talked about the interview he’d conducted with an Ohio Department of Transportation driver who’d advised cars to turn on their headlights.
Then he conducted a demonstration of the snow’s depth with a paper coffee cup he’d apparently pulled out of the trash.
“Now let me take this cup,” he said, placing it in the snow, “and it goes virtually all the way to the end—4 to 5 inches already.”
Next time, Ramos will remember to bring a ruler.
Bad weather is to the TV news business what Christmas is to the elves who live at the North Pole. Television stations drop everything and call everyone in to work to give their viewers nonstop coverage of what’s happening outside.
The folks at Channel 6 were so excited they rolled out the moniker Team Coverage: Winter Weather Alert—not to be confused with Team Coverage: Arctic Blast, which they’d used for last week’s snowfall.
Such coverage is something that cable TV can’t offer. Bill O’Reilly, Larry King and Tony Soprano might know about a lot of things, but they can’t tell you the driving conditions on I-270 between Groveport and Grove City.
And so the local stations give center stage to their weather personalities and send their correspondents out to various highway locations to stand shivering in the snow.
The problem is that once they’re out there in the elements, these reporters don’t quite know what to do with themselves.
They conduct perfunctory interviews with drivers, who say the roads are bad, and with ODOT and city transportation officials, who urge drivers to be careful. And they repeatedly tell viewers to avoid going outside unless they absolutely have to.
Of course, these reporters absolutely have to. If they weren’t out there talking at cameras, how—without peering out your own window—would you know what the snow looks like?
And so, to prove the value of this on-site reporting, each correspondent at some point resorts to something along the lines of Ramos’s cup demonstration, as if to prove to the skeptical home viewer that they’re really outside and it’s really snowing.
Channel 6’s Crystal Davis, also reporting from Delaware County, opted for a snow shovel.
“I’m going to do a little shoveling here,” she told her viewers at her station’s noon newscast, “and taking a look at the snow, you can really see not that much ice, but they do have about 4 1/2 inches of snow here.”
Channel 4’s John Ivanic was lazier than most of his colleagues—reporting from just outside the NBC4 studio on Olentangy River Road—but more practical: He brought a yardstick and concluded there was “about 5 inches of snow” during 4’s noon newscast Tuesday.
Someone must have told 6’s Crystal Davis about Ivanic’s innovation, because by the time she reappeared on the air during a special 4 o’clock weather report on Channel 6, she had a yardstick, too. Davis seemed disappointed when, because of the freezing rain, the snow measured only 3 inches this time.
“But I measured 5 inches earlier today,” she said.
The afternoon ice storm provided grateful reporters with a new prop: They could actually pick up pieces of ice and wave it around, a feat demonstrated almost identically by Channel 4’s Ana Jackson, 6’s Mike Rowe and 10’s Lindsey Seavert.
By the 11 p.m. shows, they were still coming up with new ways to illustrate the weather.
For instance, there was 4’s Mindy Drayer, who used a plastic bag to demonstrate the physics of wind in a far less dramatic way than the similar scene in American Beauty. Drayer then cut to footage of her adorable children shoveling the snow in front of her house.
Since TV news crews don’t cover wars, they cover nasty weather as if it were war. Not only do they dress more informally than usual—baseball caps and hooded jackets are suddenly perfectly fine to wear on television—but they make pointed references to the hardships they themselves are enduring.
“We’ve just been pounded,” declared Channel 10’s Ramos, as if he were embedded with a unit taking heavy fire in Baghdad.
But the Sixers seemed most undone by the weather. Simone Wilkinson—who still managed to look pretty in her Elmer Fudd-style earflap hat—complained, “It feels like someone is throwing grit on my face.”
Channel 4, meanwhile, allowed its photographers to draw fire.
“Andy the cameraman just said it hurts when it hits your head,” said a slightly amused Ivanic.
And 6’s poor Mary Jedlicka—who clearly was battling a cold—was sent outside at noon, reporting from a bridge over I-70 Downtown.
Jedlicka reported there were “ice pelts coming out” and “melting on my jacket.”
“And the ice and the rain—that’s what’s going to cause a problem later on today.”
So don’t drive on Mary Jedlicka’s jacket.
Channel 6’s venerable Carol Luper risked life and limb while interviewing Fairfield County Sheriff Dave Phalen outside in the freezing rain. Luper held a protective black umbrella with which she at least once smacked Phalen in the head.
“We are standing on ice over snow over ice,” Luper intoned dramatically, while Phalen looked like he wanted to get away from her umbrella.
As the TV soldiers were putting their lives on the line out in the field, the weather generals were sizing up the battle from the warmth of their studios.
Chris Bradley, 10’s chief meteorologist, twice disrupted As the World Turns from his weather center.
“Let me show you the special graphics I’ve prepared,” Bradley said. He then pointed to a green map of the state with a wave of pink advancing from the northwest.
During a second interruption of the CBS soap opera, Bradley seemed peeved that his studio people had failed to promptly re-display the “special graphics” he’d been so proud of earlier.
“Can we go over to the weather graphics, please?” he asked, clearly losing his patience. “I don’t think we can. Jerry, back to you.”
Dr. Phil was not the only daytime personality to be interrupted by repeated breathless weather updates Tuesday. Montel Williams, Oprah Winfrey and the women of The View—who were hosting a suspiciously youthful-looking John Stamos—all experienced similar indignities.
Channel 4 intruded upon All My Children so Marshall McPeek could conduct an interview with Robert Crocket of the Ohio Emergency Management Agency. It began thusly:
McPeek: “Robert, it’s a mess out there. What’s it like from your perspective?”
Crocket: “Well, we’re pretty much seeing what you’re seeing.”
But the real victim was poor Maury Povich, whose entire 4 p.m. program was replaced by a special NewsCenter weather report on Channel 6.
Adding insult to injury, it quickly became clear that the station didn’t really have that much to report.
In fact, that had become apparent four hours earlier, at noon, when 6’s noon newscast included Luper’s investigation of how the weather has impacted the sweets industry.
“It really is slowing down the customers coming in to buy Valentine’s Day candy today,” Luper said.
“Now we can show you what’s going upstairs at Anthony Thomas. They are making chocolate-covered strawberries. That process is going on right now.”
Then she interviewed Anthony Thomas’s Candi Trifelos—presumably after demanding to speak with a candy-company employee named Candi.
“The strawberries,” Luper gravely asked Trifelos, “are they OK?”
The 4 p.m. report didn’t include anything as memorable as Luper’s Anthony Thomas story, though it did feature an exclusive on-location report by Sean Cuellar—from the Channel 6 newsroom.
Cuellar gushed about the tireless work NewsCenter employees were doing to keep up with the various event cancellations throughout the day.
“These guys are fielding hundreds of phone calls,” Cuellar said, standing in front of what appeared to be actual guys fielding actual calls.
“In the last 15 minutes, this is what we found out: Tuttle Mall, City Center will be shutting down at 5. Polaris and Easton will be closing down at 6 tonight. So if you’re working there tonight, if you’re thinking of going shopping, stay home.”
You mean City Center doesn’t always close at 5?
Erik Johns contributed to this story.
PING!
I have relatives that will spend an entire winter storm glued to the TV in their homes with shades drawn. It is snowing outside but these people will never see it. Instead, they watch it snow on television sitting in their chairs, slack-jawed, with a bowl of chips by their side.
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