The View from Mudsock Heights: When the Hoped-For Disaster Fails to Strike, Television News is Bared

By Dennis E. Powell | Mar 10, 2010 at 23:46:0

You’ve probably seen it: A movie or television drama that depicts news coverage of some anticipated disaster. It might be an alien invasion, or a nuclear attack, a volcano, an approaching asteroid, or — a tsunami.

It is this last that comes to mind, because (as of this writing — there’s still time to top it) possibly the most ridiculous live television news coverage in all of history took place just under two weeks ago as the networks geared up to cover the tsunami that was about to destroy Hawaii.

It all began with the earthquake in Chile, an 8.8 on the currently used scale.

(There used to be something called the Richter Scale, in which each increase of 1 meant an earthquake that was 10 times as powerful — a 6 was 10 times as strong as a 5, for instance. This is simple enough understand until we get to, say, 5.7. There is — or was, these things are hard to follow — the Mercalli Intensity Scale, which is more based on how people feel and feel about the earthquake, and is in Roman numerals. Now there is the moment magnitude scale, which leaves the pronouncement of earthquake strength to those who studied calculus and were looking for something to do with it.)

The earthquake in Chile was among the strongest ever recorded. But the television news folk realized that after the much weaker but more personally devastating earthquake in Haiti people have pretty much had their fill of collapsed buildings and people buried alive. The story had to be covered, of course, but wasn’t there maybe some new peg?

Aha! A tsunami! A giant wave, hundreds of feet high, sweeping across the holiday paradise locations of the Pacific, leaving death and ruin in their path and probably a little smugness in the minds of viewers stuck in the frozen northern latitudes. What could be better television?

Very quickly CNN and FNC began their tsunami watches. (Actually, for once CNN was a little more over the top than Fox was.)

There is vast potential in 24-hour news channels. Broadcast news has traditionally and of necessity hit only the high spots in its coverage. In living memory — mine, and I’m alive — the national and international news were covered in the evenings in a 15-minute broadcast anchored by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. This was later expanded to half an hour. Usually, the important top news got short shrift, while the back end had long features that nobody remembered an hour later.

Then came CNN (and, briefly, something called Satellite News Channel, but it went out of business after 15 months) which covered the news round-the-clock. It was hoped by some news junkies that this meant that stories would now be covered in depth, that instead of just the headline (“Man knocks down old woman”) we would also get details and modifying aspects (“to get her out of the path of a speeding bus”). It hasn’t worked out that way.

In-depth coverage on the all-news channels is typically limited to an hour devoted to helicopter views of California police chasing someone in a car. (If this were so important, don’t you think that sometime later we’d learn the identity of the transgressor, what he or she was charged with, and how the case got resolved? But we never do, unless the miscreant is O.J. Simpson.) Important issues are covered by two or more people appearing on split screen and hollering at each other for awhile, after which the anchor, who went to college to learn how to comb his hair or to be a lawyer, says something insightful, such as “Well, we’ll have to just wait and see “ (or, more often, “take a wait-and-see approach”).

Now, they thought (and, one suspects, hoped) that a huge tidal wave would devastate Hawaii and they’d have it on live television.

But for the tragedy in Chile, the coverage would have been hilarious, a kind of self-parody not seen since Monty Python. The huge wave would strike the island paradise at 4:19 p.m. eastern time (later rescheduled for 4:05). Cameras were set up. There was everything except a countdown clock. There might have been a countdown clock on MSNBC; nobody knows.

They glossed over experts who pointed out that a tsunami doesn’t arrive as a towering wave but instead a very fast rise in the water level. They wanted a big wave, and they wanted to spend all day building up to it.

They were ready. You could feel the tension in the air. They made fun of the foolish people out on the streets, unaware that they were about to be swept to their deaths. Oh, the humanity! Oh, what great television!

But … 4:05 came and went and Hawaii was still there. Well, maybe it will be the second or third wave that does the trick, the anchors said hopefully. By now you could hear the desperation, see the flop sweat, as if they’d told a joke that no one got.

Of course, it was a joke. And everyone got it. Except them.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.