Storms and Broadcasting

Welcome, weather-challenged reader, as this week the Bay Area went into meltdown at the prospect of it raining a bit. In practice, it did rain a bit, but not nearly as much as on New Year's Eve; a few trees blew down, and it wasn't particularly extreme. We're all fine here, thanks for asking.

The storm gives us a wonderful lens through which to assess the state of TV broadcasting here in the US. The first point to note is that no-one really watches broadcast TV here any more; the streaming services have more-or-less killed the broadcasters. That means broadcasting is reduced to coverage of live events: mostly sport, the weather, how many people were shot in Oakland today, that sort of thing. As a result, when there's any kind of weather story to be had, goodness me, the TV stations are going to make sure they capitalize. The BBC it ain't.

The structure of broadcasting is pretty unusual here too. Given the size of the country and variety of timezones, national broadcasters are really just an illusion: what claims to be CBS, NBC or ABC here in the Bay Area is actually a local station that just happens to be affiliated with the national broadcaster, and carries some amount of their programming. That means that a lot more news coverage is highly localized, although here in the Bay Area that results in San Francisco and San Jose stories really dominating. There's also the slightly odd practice of what was live TV on the East Coast being replayed here 3 hours later as if it's live, so for New Year we got to see Puerto Rico celebrating 2023 at 11pm Pacific time, 3 hours after they actually got there. I'm not sure why or if that made any sense.

So, this week, the local stations managed to get 3 days of programming out of what was forecast to be a large storm incoming from the Pacific: one day of "here's the Bay Area preparing for this huge storm", one day of "we're in the middle of a huge storm", one day of "here's the Bay Area cleaning up after this huge storm". ABC7 in particular went to town on this: they live in a charmed, childlike world where even the simplest things are astounding. They're very proud of their exclusive to ABC7 Storm Impact Scale, which rates the strength of storms on a 1-5 scale. Now you may think that this isn't particularly innovative, exciting or even useful, but frankly that's why you don't work for ABC7, dear reader. I can guarantee that none of these people have seen The Day Today or would understand that it's a satire even if they did.

ABC7 decided that for this week's storm, they were going to crack out 5 on the Storm Impact for the first time in the 7 years since they've been using it, and took every opportunity to remind us of that. They also pulled in pretty much everyone that's ever stood in front of a camera to report on either preparations for, or cleanup after, the storm. This led to some fairly embarrassing SNAFUs displaying the kind of amateurism for which local broadcasting is rightfully famous.

In the event, the storm wasn't even all that bad. It rained quite hard for a couple of hours, the wind blew a bit, but of course this is a part of the world where neither of those things happen that often, so there was a reasonable amount of disruption. If this was an Atlantic storm in October in the UK, it would have been fairly unremarkable.

Anyway, hopefully the consistent rain which is forecast for the next week or two will do something about the overall drought conditions here. We'll keep our fingers crossed; now pass the remote, I need to catch up with the Storm Impact Scale!