Warning: Do Not Try This At Home

News coverage during bad weather is absurdly fascinating.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hurricane, tornado, ice storm, or a nuclear heat wave and the “officials” are warning people to take cover and stay indoors, the media outlets don’t hesitate to send their hard-hitting reporters out in the field to give a play-by-play.  Do the media have special insurance to cover when their reporters get frostbite or blow away during a hurricane?  Are these poor people the ones the station doesn’t want to fire but secretly hopes that they’ll quit if they torture them enough?

Take this morning as an example.  We’re iced in.  All of the schools are closed and even the airport is shut down. Everyone is being told to stay in, stay warm, and don’t get out on the roads.  Yet I woke up and turned on the TV to see various reporters stationed at the most dangerous interchanges in the city.  These “dedicated” journalists were showing just how slippery and treacherous the roads were by skidding across the sidewalks in their snow boots and they even had a guy driving a car with what one station likes to call “the jam cam” attached to the front grill.  That was actually the most entertaining part of the report.

The “jam cam” driver appeared to be on a suicide mission.  He was driving about 50 miles per hour on a sheet of ice.  He was driving so fast that the in-studio traffic lady even suggested he slow down.  But there was no stopping him.  Each time they flashed back to Mr. Jam Cam, it seemed like he was moving even faster.  At one point, it looked like he was about to drive straight into the middle of an accident that already had the highway shut down.  Who knows, maybe he was just caught in a perpetual slide and his brakes were no use.

Why do we love watching potential disasters in the making?  I for one find it completely laughable when the weatherman is standing out in the surf talking about the dangerous riptides.  I love it when you see a reporter tethered to a palm tree during a hurricane telling us it’s raining and windy.  I’m not laughing at their potential demise.  I’m laughing at their job.  I wait anxiously for the day when one of those rain-soaked or snow covered reporters finally has enough and tells his bosses on air right then and there that they can take this job and shove it.

And, even though all of our jobs present their own challenges and obstacles, as I sit at home today in my pjs, it makes me appreciate my job a little more when I see these frozen, wet, and windblown schmoes reporting the obvious and looking completely miserable while they do it.