Irene Coverage: Too Much, or Just Right?

The great hurricane of last weekend has left a mess in its wake. We're not talking about Irene -- this is all about the media coverage of the storm as Irene pulled a veni, vidi, vici act that was unparalleled in the annals of weather examination. And the mess it left? An unresolvable controversy over whether the hurricane coverage was all too much, or whether you never can have enough.

George Will dubbed it "synthetic hysteria," and Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast made no bones. "Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon," Kurtz concluded. The Washington Post's former media critic wrote that "the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings" because TV producers were afraid to switch away from 24x7 coverage of Irene. "Does anyone seriously believe the hurricane would have drawn the same level of coverage if it had been bearing down on, say, Ft. Lauderdale?"

But some pundits were more forgiving. In this morning's Wall Street Journal, for example, Bret Stephens suggested that the news explosion could have been expected given that, "New York, always self-infatuated, is the world's media capital and hasn't been hit by a hurricane in decades"; Kurtz also allowed as how the bullseye on New York City fed the media hype machine. And Bill O'Reilly thought that, overall, the coverage was just about right in its tone and volume, he said on his Fox News show on Monday night.

Actually, Kurtz also identified a factor that may have played the biggest role of all in the port-to-port coverage of Irene: politicians wanting to stay visible during the crisis. No incumbent, starting with President Obama, wanted to get "Katrina-ed" the way that President Bush and state and local leaders in Louisiana did when the super-destructive hurricane hit extremely vulnerable New Orleans in 2006 and they were perceived as being ill-prepared. So New York's Michael Bloomberg, and East Coast governors including Christie of New Jersey, Cuomo of New York, and McDonnell of Virginia, commanded lots of media attention by calling regular press conferences, some right on top of one another, to sound the alarm -- and to show they were on top of things and in charge, as their constituencies wanted them to be. (Bloomberg had been criticized as detached and unprepared after a major blizzard last January.)

Other salient facts in this debate: 38 people, at latest count, were killed in the devastation, and at least $12 billion in property damage was done, per first estimates. If media warnings had been a little less intense over the 72 hours that preceded the storm's arrival, would the death toll have been a lot higher? "For every excess," the Christian Science Monitor noted, "there are examples of lives saved and property protected."

Some things in the wake of Irene are much clearer, of course. A handful of the participating media, such as The Weather Channel, got a huge boon from all the attention to Irene; and the brands that made it into the few commercial breaks, including Geico and Bayer, may have too. But local and national news outlets canceled fulfillment of tens of millions of dollars of advertising. The weekend movie box-office on the Eastern Seaboard suffered greatly, of course. And a huge loss of business was suffered by  East Coast eateries, Atlantic City casinos and other entertainment venues.

So is there a lesson for next time? Unfortunately, it may not be too long before we find out: Tropical Storm Katia is already churning in the east Atlantic.