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Like everything else in this
show biz world, weather hype knows no season.
I’m not knocking Mother Nature.
On a dull news day, where would newscasts be if she didn’t threaten
once in awhile. The old girl is no saint.
When the rains came, in mid-April,, television coverage went into
overdrive.
in the Big Apple and tri-state area.
All during the week before, the operative word was “feared .“ Watch
out.
A nor-easter was coming down the track. Record rainfall, flooding,
beach
erosion, high anxiety.
We lucked out. Little damage and no deaths. No worst-case scenario.
There’s no argument about the importance of forecasting (just ask
farmers,
travelers, schedule makers.) Crucial decision-making is often
dependent on it.
Weather broadcasts are a big time budget item.
Well-paid forecasters are personality-driven, part TV star and part
scientist,
usually holding firm credentials in meteorology
Broadcast production costs keep jumping, Chalk that up to widening
media
competition and all the money spent on state-of-the-art weather
technology..
Am I wrong?
Or does TV sometimes sound too many alarm bells in advance? Do
on-screen graphics sometimes seem overwhelming, too cluttered.? Full
throttle Daytona-500
racing arrows, graphs with too little reading time on small screens
and hand aerobics as the talent does his or her best to follow the
bouncing ball?
When I first broke into broadcasting fifty years ago, weather shows
were
straight-faced, dry, and pedantic, with no frills. The typical
talent was a news
reader with a script in hand. On radio, they were exclusively men.
On early
television, they all wore skirts, a chorus line of attractive
weather girls.
But in any case, none were bonafide meteorologists
I worked the radio side with a newscaster at the NBC station in New
York, doing a
a morning rush hour show. The broadcast wrapup was always an
extended weather
report, with a signature gimmick found in a thesaurus and just three
little words...
“What kind of day is it going to be?
A three “H” day. Hot, humid, hazy.
A three “B” day Bitter, bleak, blowy.
A three “W” day Warm., windy, wild.
You get the idea.
That old time religion would still be good enough for me, even now.
When the weather hits a stretch that’s basically the same everyday,
and not headline material, I would still be happy with just three
little words --
A three “S’ day: Stormy, slippery, stay in.
A three “G”day: Gusty, galoshes, gloomy.
A three “C”day: Cloudy, clammy, clinging.
Or in the William F. Buckley Jr. tradition, a three “F” day: Foggy,
Fractious, Fetid.
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Gene Farinet, an award winning veteran newsman, spent much of his long
career at NBC News as a writer and producer working with Frank McGee,
Ed Newman, John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw, covering space, politics
and special projects everywhere in the world.
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