My Storm Is The Storm

Hurricane Irene didn't create much damage in Boston two weekends ago, nor as much as was originally expected in New York. (I remember one 30-minute period where the wind was strong and the windows rattled, but aside from what looks like a lot of pencil shavings on my Subaru, not much happened in my neighborhood.) As a result, by mid-day Sunday, before the storm had finished passing through the Northeast, plenty of pundits, from veterans like Howard Kurtz to simpletons like Michael Graham, had declared Irene to be the biggest media fabrication in recent memory.

In the end, the storm was actually quite powerful and destructive: About 55 people died, a few million lost power, parts of metro New York were flooded for days, and much of upstate New York and Vermont was ravaged. That the country's most populous corridor, from D.C. to Boston, was in Irene's direct path and potentially subject to a serious natural disaster merited plenty of advance coverage. The Northeast has a serious hurricane only about once every 20 years, so many are underprepared. (And that Irene came only several days after an earthquake was certainly bizarre.) Now, I don't have cable so I didn't see the widely described hysteria of local TV reporters and the Weather Channel, but considering the aftermath, maybe the coverage was underdone. Sure, it would've been a lot worse had Battery Park City fallen back into the harbor, but the consequences were serious.

The wild fluctuations in coverage highlight two telling phenomena about the early 21st century. First, as has been written many times before, the need to be out in front of a story is now more important than the need to be accurate -- setting the trend with an opinion or prediction is valued more than doing so with facts. Kurtz and Graham look foolish for anointing themselves right and everyone wrong when they're cast with the latter now too for writing before thinking. Second and somewhat related, Graham and everyone on Twitter and Facebook griping about the hurricane that wasn't miss the greater context. The storm wasn't bad for them, so, they conclude, it must not have been bad anywhere. Navel gazing isn't anything new, but when you can broadcast what's inside your navel to anyone you like as often as you like, it becomes carelessly myopic.

The damage Hurricane Irene inflicted on Vermont is certainly the storm's most disappointing result. Whole towns were isolated because their roads became too ripped to travel; vibrant downtowns had several feet of standing water; small rivers rushed over their banks, destroying farmland and dairy farms; covered bridges were torn off their foundations. Vermont is a special place with a very self-sufficient personality, but it also has a lot of industry, namely farming, where the margins are thin and the product unable to sustain such a monumental blow during the summer. In addition, the construction season only lasts into about late October, so the damage will be evident for many months. The state deserves all the help it can get.

Update: Local media pundit Dan Kennedy argues the same as I, though with less opining about the 21st century, here.