Mother Nature: Fooled ya! (giggle) - Ctd

THE TROUBLE with criticizing the media (which I do often) is that one can over do it (which I have on occasion). I pulled my punches on the media's coverage of Hurricane Irene. I shouldn't have. Take it away Howard Kurtz: As dawn broke on Sunday morning "the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize. And at 9 a.m., you could almost hear the air come out of the media’s hot-air balloon of constant coverage when Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm. ... Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. 'Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,' Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted. ... But the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings. ... The fact that New York, home to the nation’s top news outlets, was directly in the storm’s path clearly fed this story-on-steroids." Nor was the web immune from overdramatizing Irene: "Lash Us to the Mast!" screamed a TPM headline Friday night. To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park after he realizes the park is out of control: "Boy, do I hate being right all the time!" I'm sure Howie Kurtz feels the same.