David John Mead

I expect my natural disaster in HD…

On Saturday @jules23 & I were sitting down after digging out the drive when she said about a lot people on Twitter talking about the expected tsunami hitting Hawaii.  This was a result from the recent quake in Chile. We turned on CNN and what did we get? Some guys video (which looked sent from a mobile phone), from a balcony being Skyped through a web site that was not affiliated with CNN. Cut that with voice over from a local Hawaiian TV station and some random shots of a guy surfing.

Paparazzi can get HD video of Jennifer Aniston picking her nose from 300 yards away but world-wide news agencies can’t do better than Skype? C’mon.

After cycling through this same stuff for about 10 minutes we switched to MSNBC.

They were no better. They had similar file footage spliced into a 3 minute reel of camera crews on a cliff watching a helicopter, that was telling some surfers to get out of the water.  The anchor had to keep telling us that this was file footage from a least two hours ago.

Both channels kept saying the Hilo Bay would be first hit but no one seemed to have a camera there.  We were told New Zealand experienced some tsunami effects, but again no video or coverage from their local channels. Same for the Pacific coast beaches on the mainland. Nothing from the helicopters, other islands, people at the scene.

Checking in an hour later we still saw the same, now 4 hour old, file footage! And here’s a news flash. If its 3 hours after it was supposed to happen its not breaking news!  Overall I find this embarrassing for news channels in the 21st Century.

The trend now seems to be:

1. Grab 40 seconds of amateur/file footage
2. Loop continuously
3. Repeat the two facts you have both as on-screen graphics and voice-over
4. Ignore all other news and scheduled programming
5. Bring in an “expert” or “eye-witness” and get them to repeat the same two facts
6. Go to #1 and repeat

I wasn’t expecting a Poseidon Adventure type wave to roll in, but I did expect some research, commentary, and on-camera interviews. Is that too much to ask?

Technorati tags: fail, tsunami, cnn, msnbc, news