NOW THEY TELL US – AT 8:09 A.M. ET:  Look, this is the slowest news week of the year.  It's the week when a politician makes announcements he doesn't want anyone to hear, like confirming a police report that he abused his wife or stole his grandma's Social Security checks. 

So we shouldn't be shocked by the appearance of stories like this, from The New York Times, acknowledging what we already know, that there was something rotten about the reporting of Not-quite-a-hurricane Irene:

It began as something far off and dangerous — a monster storm, a Category 3 hurricane that packed winds of 115 miles an hour as it buzz-sawed through the Caribbean last week, causing more than a billion dollars of destruction in the Bahamas alone.

But when Hurricane Irene finally chugged into the New York area on Sunday, it was like an overweight jogger just holding on at the end of a run. Its winds had diminished to barely hurricane strength, and the threat from its storm surge, which officials had once worried might turn Manhattan into Atlantis, was epitomized by television news reports showing small waves lapping over reporters’ feet.

All hurricanes evolve, and most weaken, as they track northward, their size and strength affected by water, wind and terrain. And all hurricanes eventually die — a relatively quick downgrade to a tropical storm in the case of those, like Irene, that travel inland, a more lingering demise for those that trail out to the colder waters of the higher latitudes.

But Irene’s fall — from potential storm of the century to an also-ran in hurricane lore — was greater than most.

COMMENT:  Some experts were indeed warning, as the storm moved north, that it was mostly hype.  I must modestly point out that I started noticing a discrepancy between the hype and the actual statistics from the storm on Thursday night. 

Our national and state nannies will tell us that it's better to be safe than sorry, and that is true.  But it's better still to tell the whole truth.  As we've pointed out here, there've been a number of these over-hyped storm reports, and the danger is that people will just start tuning out.  Indeed, it happened in New York over this last weekend. 

They should rename Irene as Hurricane Duracell, for the chief beneficiary of the storm.  The networks might also consider charging politicians for the air time in the future.  Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey was on TV so much, I thought it was a telethon.  I wanted to make a pledge.

Media critic Howard Kurtz has a solid assessment of the journalistic hype here.

Oh, there are reports of locusts...

August 29, 2011