It's early in the day but so far, the media' coverage of Irma's attack last night is unilluminating, even pathetic
/There's nothing of value that I can find, merely rehashes of old, inaccurate stories and speculation of damage based on the same horror predictions. The NYTs, among other "news" sources, has dropped its cash wall on hurricane reporting for the duration (a nice gesture), so I turned to it, hoping that that once great paper might still offer something of value. No such luck. Yesterday they had my cousin Henry, a science reporter, for crying out loud (in fact, he once edited the paper's since section) covering a sob-sister story about elderly patients in a nursing home, and their other reporters were assigned similarly useless tasks.
This morning's edition reports that Miami residents' cellphones and laptops are running out of battery power and the people are "fidgety". Oh, the humanity! The paper also repeats the claim that "four people have been killed" by the storm down in the Keys. Even one death is sad, of course, and come daylight, perhaps more deaths will be discovered, but for now, careful reading of the story shows that one of those four died "of natural causes". A minor matter, I suppose, but the media's insistence on boosting the death toll by including an old man whose time on this mortal coil had simply expired is, in my opinion, telling.
It's frustrating to have no reliable source of news on this storm (other than Mike Finkbeiner's reports over on EOS's site, but that lazy guy is, as of this writing, still abed). Frustrating because we have a number of FWIW readers who are either down there now or own property there (poor Libertarian Advocate just purchased a bungalow on Islamorada 10 days ago, damnit, and I need to know whether I'll have a fishing base to visit this winter), and I'm concerned. The few media reports there are from there focus on washing machines and the odd skiff floating around, but those are the effects of any normal hurricane, not a "nuclear explosion", as was being predicted. Is were more?
The positive side of this failure to report may be that it finally stamps paid to the illusion that we have a national press corp that's capable of providing hard, objective reporting. Instead, it's been exposed as the gang of ratings-obsessed jackals that it is, clinging to its meme: disaster, global warming, the foolishness of individuals, long past the time when the facts showed otherwise.
Certainly the media should have passed on NOAA's warning of a huge, apocalyptic storm bearing down on Florida, especially after that storm had just destroyed entire islands in the Caribbean, and I don't fault NOAA for predicting disaster, but as the past two days wore on, and Irma was slowed, then broken during her passage over Cuba, and the obvious was becoming, well, obvious, the press stuck to its original meme, and hyped its coverage by focusing on, say, 2' of water rushing down the streets of Miami and claiming that the end of the world, if it hadn't yet arrived, was still coming.
Phooey.