Unconvincing News

I usually turn on Headline News in the morning when I wake up so I don't fall right back to sleep. Sometimes I do anyway, but most of the time HLN is able to keep me awake, if only from the physical effort of rolling my eyes when celebrity-groupie Adriana Costa starts blithering about (pick one) Angelina, Tom, Brad, Britney, Paris, or Madonna. She even refers to Madonna as "Mad", a slice of gushy faux familiarity that makes my flesh crawl. (Since when "entertainment reporting" become synonymous with "celebrity reporting"? And why is Paris famous in the first place?)

But the less I say about her the better. This morning they had news of the big storm that is attacking the Northeast, and I don't doubt that it's a bad storm. But their coverage made it seem like some kind of giant cover-up.

They kept cutting to reporters in the field in Hyannis, who carried on at some length about the power and ferocity of the storm. But where they were, it wasn't raining, there was hardly any wind at all, and the harbor was quite calm. They kept saying "Yes, the flags are flapping here, as you can see." Well, the flags flap pretty much everywhere!

You want to make a point about the power of the storm? Send someone to where the storm is! Don't prop some flunkie up in front of a calm, placid harbor and have them point to waving flags as evidence of the storm's wrath. You might as well not cut away from the studio at all, because it just makes me think the storm has been trumped up.