Last night's tropical storm here in Durham was the same as any old rainstorm in Chicago: Steady (and heavy at times) rain, with lots of wind. No local flooding, and it was 65 degrees and windy and drizzly today. Ho hum. It was worse south and east of here, but mostly just some power outages and high wind, with some local flooding. If they hadn't hyped it up as a tropical storm, I would have thought it was just a front moving through.
That's the problem with the media (I wrote a J200 paper on this my sophomore year of college). Weather is weather. It's great to be prepared for HUGE weather events, but it need not be the entire day's news. This morning we had all local news instead of Good Morning America/Today Show. And all they talked about was that it rained. They do the same thing everywhere--any sort of bigger weather event warrants over-coverage, which ends up either freaking people out over nothing or repeating the same news instead of giving people useful information. Whatever happened to the days when a little box would sit in the corner of the screen with color codings for watches and warnings, and if specific areas were in immediate danger, a warning would come over the air telling people to seek shelter immediately. When the storm blew through, the warnings and boxes would go away and we would go about our lives, usually none the worse for wear.
