There is something a little absurd about watching the weather on TV while it is happening just beyond our windows. Most of what we see is so obvious: Snow comes down, wind picks up, plows roll through. We watch anyway. Toward the end of the segment filmed on Long Island, the newscaster reminds us that it is still very early on, that it is going to be a very long day, that there is still much more to come. We have to stay tuned.
Weathercasting has become more and more fraught as extreme weather events become more frequent. Journalists put themselves in harm’s way to document storms and fires and tornadoes. Sometimes they stand on-camera with water rising behind them or winds blowing so fiercely that they can barely stand, prompting debate over the utility of ritualistically addressing a camera in the middle of, say, a hurricane. But it is a television tradition, stormcasting, old enough that it is hard to imagine it disappearing entirely. Major networks, including Fox, are increasingly investing in weather reporting, hiring meteorologists and data analysts, betting that as more and more disasters unfold, we will want to watch them live on TV.
But then there is reporting from the scene of regular old noncatastrophic weather — the kind the newscaster on Long Island was describing, the kind that is interesting only locally, and attended to by unglamorous local media. This weather is not, in itself, so visually dramatic; snowfall, even really destructive snowfall, consists mostly of sprinkling. There the arc of a blizzard is usually much the same. The storm descends, then lifts. It might leave fallen branches, power outages, impassable roads. People venture outside for snowball fights or sledding. Streets and sidewalks are plowed, salted, shoveled. Eventually the snow melts, leaving everything muddier than before, and we wait for the next storm.
News coverage becomes more like an extended, dramatized version of small talk.
But the newscaster turns all this into a collective event infused with drama and meaning. There is utility to the coverage, but issues like road conditions are usually taken care of quickly. After that, these broadcasts become a kind of improvised human-interest story about people dealing with snow. Pedestrians are stopped on the street and asked about their experience; often they have little to say beyond confirming that yes, it’s really coming down. Newscasters pull out rulers, describe wind speeds, offer statistics on the local history of precipitation. They might ad-lib, as Channel 4’s Brian Thompson did earlier this year, about what it might be like to be a dog seen romping through the snow — or comment on how, as mentioned in a previous segment, 7-Eleven was closed, leaving no place to get coffee. News coverage becomes more like an extended, dramatized version of small talk.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
