I followed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's advice Monday and worked from home. Of course, I do most of my work from home and I'm not anywhere near New Jersey.
But I was near Hurricane Irene over the weekend as I watched the storm march up the East Coast, flipping from CNN to Fox News to the Weather Channel. As you certainly know, it didn't fizzle out, but it wasn't the catastrophe it could have been.
And, on Monday, I watched the hurricane of criticism over how TV covered the storm, starting with the first blow from media critic Howard Kurtz at the Daily Beast.
"The tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings," he wrote. "Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly – say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya – was to risk driving viewers elsewhere."
Ill winds blew in from London's Telegraph, where U.S. editor Toby Harnden blogged: "The truth is that the dire warning beforehand suited both politicians and journalists. Just as with the minor earthquake that shook the east coast last week causing no loss of life and virtually no damage, Irene became a huge story because it was where the media lived."
One of the TV folks who stood in the storm on Sunday morning was NBC's Al Roker, who tweeted his defense of the coverage, "Since when is covering a storm that kills 16 people and counting, causes massive flooding and millions in damage hype?"
The fact is that the post-storm coverage critiques are now as much a part of the weather cycle as the coverage itself. They're just easier to predict and don't even have a potential for significant damage.
The ickiest Hurricane Irene video: Here's the clip that stood out from the weekend's hurricane coverage that originally aired on Washington, D.C.'s Fox affiliate. The reporter is Tucker Barnes:
On TV: Sunday's Video Music Awards on MTV pulled in MTV's largest audience ever, according to Nielsen, which counted 12.4 million viewers for the annual awards show.
- "Absolutely Fabulous" will return for three 20th anniversary specials co-produced by BBC America and Logo with the original cast.
- The death of Charlie Sheen's character will be part of the plot all season on CBS' Sheen-less "Two and a Half Men," Jon Cryer tells EW.com.
- HLN's unpleasant legal squawker, Nancy Grace, is on the list of participants in the next season of ABC's "Dancing with the Stars."
- The search for a new home for Ray Romano's canceled "Men of A Certain Age" has ended, Deadline.com reports.
John Goodman joins "Community": NBC is offering a peak at John Goodman's new role on this fall's "Community," (which comes, of course, from Milwaukee's "ComedySportz-trained" Dan Harmon.)
And, no, he doesn't play a nice guy. Here's the video:
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
