The East Coast tilt of national news operations is never so obvious as when there’s something like weather occurring there.
The possibility of snow, not so long ago considered part of winter like rain is part of spring, is now a call for full team coverage, no matter how benign the snow seems.
And how strange it looked Monday, as anchors deployed in their color-coordinated jackets and station-branded knit caps stood on empty street corners all over the Northeast to explain the apocalypse coming.
Whatever they were blabbing on about — the wind is really picking up now, the flake are getting bigger — it was clear from pictures that the snow was barely covering the pavement. It certainly wasn’t covering their shoes.
And the people in those cars driving around on MSNBC or — now indisputably worst of all, CNN — to show how bad the streets were actually just demonstrated that they were passable and just possibly they were violating the curfews they were urging others to keep. Don Lemon just made it worse in a tank-like thing they called the BlizzardMobile — the funniest gimmick they’ve tried since the Hologram.
But even if it was obvious from the pictures that things weren’t so bad, every reporter I saw tried to argue the opposite: No, this is bad, and it’s getting worse. How I wish there was one honest reporter who looked around and shrugged back to the anchor, Honestly, this isn’t so bad at all.
But if we needn’t fear the snow, it’s clear we do have to fear the messengers, for it is their carping (and not snow) that led to actual negative effects: Tens of thousands of canceled flights, closing highways, stopping subways (not to mention closing schools and the avalanche of consequences that has for working parents) for what turned out to be nothing.
Yes, snow fell in Boston. But I get the feeling snow falls in Boston quite a bit in winter, and they are a hardy bunch and know how to deal with it (except for those lawn-chair saving parking space people in Southie).
Part of the worsening problem are news stations that pick one story each day and report nothing else. So when everything is round-the-clock, from missing planes to deflated footballs, snow forecasts seem like armageddon.
And weather is one of those we’re-all-in-it-together disaster warning moments that is a kind of relief compared to man-made wars and mayhem.
But snow is something that happens all over the country. We just hear a lot about it when it happens on the East Coast.