TS Alberto: Hyping the News

The media has been hyping Alberto since . . . since it first began forming LONG before it even reached sustained winds of 39 miles per hour tagging it with a name. The shilling for advertisement revenue continued throughout. Today, I gotta tell you, was hyserical.

Fox's Orlando Selinis (sp?) is standing there on a beach on Florida's west coast in a rain slicker. The sun's out now, he says, but it was raining.

Bill Hemmer, another similarly dressed Fox correspondent, reporting live from another Florida beach, is dry, too. So, having to tell the viewers that somebody in Florida is probably about to die because of Alberto's fury, he starts yammering about other Florida cities than Alberto was now battering, naming mine as one of them.

Outside, the sun was shining. Yeah, we were still getting bands through periodically and probably will until midnight or so tonight. It's no big deal. Last night it rained (Yes!) steadily but except for a few gusts of maybe . . . 30 m.p.h., that's it. I'm guessing, if we were lucky, we might have gotten 2 inches of rain.

Greta was reporting live around 8 last night from one of the barrier islands on the west coast, telling viewers how bad it was going to be there . . . while waiting for the rain to start. It hadn't really started yet, she kept saying, but it was coming.

Somebody else interviewed a mayor asking if he felt confident FEMA had make sufficient preparations. Without missing a beat, the mayor replied that Florida leads the way when it comes to preparing for hurricanes, and that his city and state were ready.

Hubby watched CNN's coverage for a bit this morning, to confirm what both of us knew thanks to the media's expert and totally professional coverage of Alberto we'd been watching for days: Because of this horrible storm, we're all already dead. Or if not, we're about to be. Or something.

When there really isn't any news, the media has a desperate need to pretend that there is or try to create it. (Create? Remember all Katrina horror stories in New Orleans that turned out to be bogus?)

"This is the first storm of the seaon," wrote Florida Cracker, "and we've got to make it all the way through December. Let's pace ourselves. At this rate, everyone's going to have strokes and heart attacks before they get a chance to die from a hurricane."

"I have some mixed emotions about the media hooplah over the storm. I am all for the public being warned that there is a big blow on the way and telling us to get prepared," GuyK notes. "But some times the media just overblows it. There was this story see, about the little boy who cried WOLF just one time too many?"

I wonder who the media will be howling at when that occurs. And it will.

I doubt it will be themselves.