Running Hurricane Ike thread

No shit. Even in the sense of what happened here in the Midwest. The local level reporting has been atrocious.

 

Serious quality funny right there.

 

I agree.

 

They always are, Katrina notwithstanding.

 

Same thing with Ivan. A bunch of little inland towns nobody ever heard of in South Alabama went without power and supplies for days on end, and no one in the outside world noticed because they were too busy filming wrecked condos at Gulf Shores. Those people were hatin' on FEMA a year before it became cool.

 

So why isn't it getting more coverage?

Parts of the 5th-largest metro in the nation are still without power and might still be two weeks after the storm. If parts of DC (8th) or Boston (10th) had gone a week without power, I think it'd be a major story nationally.

Is geography (aka East Coast bias) affecting the coverage?

 

Storms are sexy.

Misery isn't.

And regarding storm coverage . . . it's amazing how Time and Newsweek always blow them off (no pun intended). Except for Katrina, of course.

If a bomb exploded in Southeast Texas and did the kind of damage Ike did . . . the coverage would be wall-to-wall.

But nature's fury?

We'll be there for the crashing waves and blowing trees . . . but stay and report in a hot, sticky, hellish part of the country with no electricity and no gasoline and no comfort? Screw that.

 

The election probably has more to do with it. Can't cover more than one big story at a time you know.

 

Nah. Probably Gulf Coast bias.

 

I'm with BTE. Nobody wants to cover misery.

I also think the finance thing, combined with election coverage, pushed Ike's damage off the page.

I wonder about that whole geographic bias. I don't discount that. I think that happens.

 

Funny thing is, this actually ties into part of the finance thing. The situation has curtailed oil production, which has got to be making people a little more jittery than they'd normally be.
But the same thing happend when Allison hit in 2001. Half of Houston was underwater and it rated a 30-second brief on Headline News.

 

One house, designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, escaped Ike on Galveston ...

http://www.ireport.com/blogs/ireport-blog/2008/09/18/the-last-house-standing?updated