From coast to coast, local and national news outlets broke into programming to give you… a natural phenomenon that happens somewhere in the world every 18 months.
To quote Shepard Smith in 2017, “They know this is all it’s going to be, right? Just a moon over a sun.”
While the cynic in me agrees with him (and the producer in me abhors weather coverage), the news media should find a way to create unifying stories outside of natural events. (For the sake of argument please note solar eclipse, earthquakes, and volcano eruptions all fall under the “weather” category of news.)
The Northeast’s weekend was bookended with both earthquake coverage and eclipse coverage. I get it, the natural world is amazing, beautiful, and sometimes unpredictable, but this does not mean “Stand in line for 4 hours to get a pair of glasses so you can look at the sun for 4 minutes.” The hysteria and hype leading up to the eclipse was laughable and unnecessary.
The obsession over an earthquake in which no one died and that caused minimal damage was hardly worth wall-to-wall coverage, especially since Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey lie on a major fault line. Not to mention, the earthquake in Astoria, Queens earlier this year received less coverage than the one on Friday.
Weather coverage is so popular and widely loved among people that a third national network is now dedicating an entire channel to weather. CBS announced the launch of its new subsidiary which may bring on another competitor to The Weather Channel. While this brings to question the current partnership of the two outlets, it means there will be more noise to filter through as you flip through your social media feed. Another outlet telling you it’s snowing in Boston in the middle of January. This is not what people need.
Instead of CBS News closing its Tokyo Bureau, it should have taken the money used to build its weather outlet and put it into its once-great foreign affairs bureaus across the globe. Not having a foothold in Asia is going to make covering China, the country which holds most of our debt and is also where we import the most amount of goods from, significantly more difficult. Knowing what’s going on in a country to which we have significant economic ties is important for every American. In fact, it could be unifying for Americans to understand how China’s climate policies are not only worse than ours but they are held to a significantly lower standard than we are.
Another unifying story, whose roads lead back to China? The illegal drugs being brought over our border and killing our children are originating in the Red Dragon Nation. While the media — more so the left than the right — turn a blind eye to China’s preverbal bamboo curtain, one thing is certain: If we continue to be distracted by natural phenomena hard hard-hitting unifying stories are being missed on both the local and national level.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying kick out your local station’s weatherperson. I’m saying there is a time and a place for weather and in a 48-minute local news show your collective weather hits should not exceed 15 of those minutes. As for national media, do better. Your viewers’ time is valuable and they have more important things to worry about than the weather happening on the opposite coastline.
Weather may be the obvious unifier, especially in local news, but the media needs to challenge itself more. The question isn’t how do we appeal to my outlet’s specific demographic but how can we be innovative and touch those in and out of my demographic. Your eclipse coverage may be disruptive to paid programming but it didn’t really add anything other than noise to an already over-told and underwhelming story.
Krystina Alarcon Carroll is a news media columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. She has experience in almost every facet of the industry including: digital and print news; live, streamed, and syndicated TV; documentary and film productions. Her prior employers have included NY1 and Fox News Digital and the Law & Crime Network. You can find Krystina on X (formerly twitter) @KrystinaAlaCarr.
