Attack of the light drizzle! How weather was taken over by the hype machine
By Robert David Sullivan | February 21, 2010 If you live anywhere around Greater Boston, you probably felt heroic about making it into work during what turned out to be the Storm That Wasn't. You must remember it, some 11 days ago. With the nation's capital socked in and New York shut down, we braced for a crippling whiteout of our own, glued to weather reports of the approaching snowmageddon. Cities and towns closed their schools, airlines grounded their planes, and the governor told "nonemergency" state workers to go home early. And then...nothing. The storm gently dusted our streets with snow and moved on. People felt a bit ridiculous afterward, and even angry toward the meteorologists and city officials who got us so worked up. If you've started to feel that anticlimaxes have become the norm in Boston, you're right. But it's not because something has changed about the weather. It's that something has changed about its packaging. Weather, especially on TV, has exited the realm of straight news, and even of entertainment, and entered the realm of marketing. Increasingly, weather is being pre-sold as a kind of public drama, one with a distinctive language and set of conventions - the military-like music, the urgent graphics, the rhetoric of promise and veiled threat. We've come to take all this for granted in a modern storm forecast. The roots of this approach though, don't lie in meteorology. They come from the hype of Hollywood and big-event television - a business in which overselling isn't a sin, as long as you draw an audience. Of course, in the case of weather, even the best promotional campaign can't actually control the product once it arrives. The images from blizzards past and the breathless voice-overs promise lots of action, but what we get isn't exactly a Quentin Tarantino movie, or even Sunday afternoon on the Golf Channel. It's more like an especially sleepy production of "The Iceman Cometh." Performed nine times in a row. In Boston, our fascination with bad weather has a lot to do with the thrill of all weather thrills: the Blizzard of '78. That was the classic New England storm story - an event whose arc really did parallel the script of a disaster movie. ... http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/02/21/attack_of_the_light_drizzle/ *********************************** * POST TO MEDIANEWS@ETSKYWARN.NET * *********************************** Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
