What you call the looming storm threatening the East Coast this Thanksgiving week depends on where you get your weather news. If it comes from the several platforms of the Weather Channel, then you know that the storm has a name, Boreas (the Greek god of the cold north wind), and so are most likely referring to it accordingly. If you get your forecasts elsewhere, then you are probably using some variant of “that shitty storm” as you nervously eye your holiday travel plans.

If this were a hurricane or a typhoon, then a standard name would be issued by the World Meteorological Organization and used by everyone reporting its path and possible effects. Such storms have been given official names for more than half a century, in order to distinguish them from one another if several form at once, and to raise awareness among the public—the idea being that a single, short name resonates more than a changing set of characteristics. But big winter storms have always been nameless, at least until last year, when the Weather Channel introduced Athena, Brutus, Caesar, and so on down to Zeus, which brought a foot of snow through the upper Midwest last April.

Announcing the Weather Channel’s plans, the meteorologist Tom Niziol wrote that “a storm with a name is easier to follow, which will mean fewer surprises and more preparation.” The public had been left unprotected, Niziol argued, and so the Weather Channel, noble public servant, was stepping in to fill the void. Outside meteorologists, however, saw it quite differently. Among the sharpest critics was Joel Myers, the president of AccuWeather, a competitor, who wrote in a statement that “in unilaterally deciding to name winter storms, The Weather Channel has confused media spin with science and public safety.” Myers went on to discount the science behind the naming plan: “Hurricanes are well-defined storms following a path that can be tracked. Winter storms are often erratic, affecting different areas unevenly.” Several news outlets issued reminders to reporters to avoid using the names. (The Weather Channel is partially owned by NBCUniversal, so Al Roker gets to use them.) The National Weather Service, meanwhile, issued an equivocal statement in which it said that it had “no opinion about private weather enterprise products and services.”

The Weather Channel had gone rogue, staking out what amounted to a sole claim over the charismatic personalities of winter weather. Their competitors’ argument that it would manage to sow chaos was partly correct, but with a twist: it would only be confusing to the public if other weather forecasters attempted to generate their own, competing names for the same storms. To submit to the naming convention owned and managed by a rival would be equally unpalatable. By being first, the Weather Channel had handcuffed the entire weather-news industry: join in, or be boring. This year, they’re back at it—and so, this week, those of us looking for a pithy way to talk about this storm have a ready option at hand. At AccuWeather and elsewhere, it is “that big churning storm headed for the East Coast.” At the Weather Channel, it is Boreas. It’s pretty clear which of these makes the better hashtag.

Maybe the Weather Channel is right, and naming winter storms is in the public interest. But it is notable that this opinion has not been shared by anyone in the nonprofit scientific community. For now, the winter-storm names seem like just another innovation by a company that long ago mastered the form of selling rain, sleet, hail, snow, and wind. Incredibly, there was a time when an entire cable channel devoted entirely to forecasts was a laughable prospect—and, in its early years, the Weather Channel ran a lot of staid and static local weather info, backed by elevator music, to fill the air. But in the intervening years, the channel has thrived by becoming, in effect, a giant American weather id—reflecting back some of our worst instincts as weather-watchers. This is often clearest on its Web site, which fuses fear-mongering about the weather with gestures toward other free-floating modern anxieties. On Monday afternoon, the top of the page featured the words: “Breaking Now: Nightmare Travel Ahead.” Headlines blare about the storm, and also about non-weather dramas that are cynical click-bait: “Shark Found Choking on WHAT?” (Answer for the insatiably curious: “A huge piece of moose hide.”)

Even the Weather Channel’s more benign television presence operates on the basic premise that the weather is God’s great performance for his people. Certainly there is delightful entertainment to be found in powerful storms; their formulation and impact and exit all form a natural narrative arc, one that begins with nervous foreshadowing and ends either with cataclysm or the rush of a near-miss. It is only after the storm hits that we may pause to reflect on the sordidness of our affinity for all the buildup. By then, the channel is marvelling at the scale of devastation and loss of life (surely a more qualified form of entertainment, but, we must be honest, a real one nonetheless) and turning our attention to the next upcoming storm. The weather never stops, and neither does our appetite for it. It’s the ultimate reality show.

Unlike reality television, the story of the weather is tied, in the end, to facts, and the Weather Channel has created a vast enterprise to predict the weather and disseminate that information to the public. Its relevance relies largely on its accuracy, and so it has no interest in reporting falsehoods or ginning up false panic. Along the way, however, it has capitalized on the essential social-ness of the weather. Media companies attempt to brand the news all the time—each day’s big event earns a tagline that flashes onto the screen beneath the hosts on CNN and Fox News. But these words—“Crisis in Syria,” and similar—are just concise descriptions of the events themselves, unlikely, in the end, to be particularly memorable. But something like “Boreas” is an ideally branded word. Every time you refer to it this week on Twitter and Facebook, you are creating a so-called impression for the Weather Channel. Two weeks ago, only Greek scholars would have been tweeting about it; today, your aunt is. How about an alternative? Let’s go with #thatshittystorm.

Photograph: The Weather Channel

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