Hurricanes and earthquakes, as we have learned this week, are very different things, not only in scientific but in narrative terms. Earthquakes appear suddenly, and most of the stories told about them focus on the surprise of the victims and the gradual discovery of consequences. Hurricanes tend to be spotted in advance, before they even are hurricanes. They come across the ocean and it can take them days to come up the coast, as slowly as a cruise ship, and so the majority of coverage is concerned with speculating on their course via timelines, arrows, and other tools of extrapolation. That is helpful, of course. But the pacing leaves something to be desired, for viewers of the news. On the map, a hurricane is a tape loop, a massive whorl rotating north and then snapping back to an earlier location, over and over again. There’s a condition called “hurricane keratopathy” that comes about when medications leave spiral deposits in the corneal surface. Eyes closed in the middle of a hurricane newscast will produce an analogous result.

That’s the way the news works, at least, with the volume off. Turn it on, though, and the whole picture changes.The reports were sober and straightforward at first; on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, most of the networks were good at explaining the difference between flooding resulting from rain and flooding resulting from storm surges. But after hours on the air, the anchors and reporters, accustomed to shoehorning stories into short segments, struggled to fill the vast expanses of time. The result was rambling, surreal, and sometimes darkly comic. The Weather Channel, which should have a handle on this kind of thing, warned of “a batch of rain” in New Jersey. A CNN reporter, after showing off some nifty manipulation of sliding touch screens (Minority weather report?), spoke of “the rain now raining in Maine.” And if Warren Buffet had a nickel for every time a reporter used the word “buffet,” he’d be a rich man.

How about the local news? On CBS: “You’ve heard other meteorologists say this is a beautiful-looking storm…it’s an ugly-looking storm.” On Fox, we learned that Irene represented “Mother Nature at its best.” And on ABC, after a female anchor reported that “Residents have been implored to leave,” her male colleague interrupted: “That’s putting it mildly.” On more than one channel, reporters observed, with a mix of condescension and fascination, the foolhardy souls who braved the outdoors, describing them as “barefoot” and “dancing” as if they had eaten brown acid at Windstock.

This should not be taken as a broad indictment of the coverage. Most of the anchors and reporters, for most of the time, did a fine job on a story that involves a serious threat to millions of people. It can’t be easy to talk about something that seems always on the brink of becoming a story. And maybe man wasn’t meant to watch seven hours of storm coverage. At some point, even the commercials started to seem like part of the problem, especially the ones for Time-Warner Cable, whose eye-and-ear logo started to look too hurricanish by half. It finally seemed prudent to turn off the news at around three o’clock in the morning on Sunday, around the time one local team began to discuss whether eyeglasses made them look more or less attractive. The storm was due to hit New York around eight. Or, as the local ABC station had it, “We’ll be back with more. Hurricane Irene: Coming, and here.”


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