Alarmist Fire Reporting


For those who haven't been watching news lately, there have been massive fires throughout Southern California (still are) this past week. Fortunately, there has been some really solid local reporting from TV (we watched a lot of KNSD , the local NBC affiliate), Radio , and print/internet . Unfortunately, for one national media outlet - and I suspect others - the reporting has been horrendous.

On Monday of this week, I went over to the Fox News website, and was hit by a huge picture of a fire and some alarmist phrase, like San Diego burning to the ground or some such. I can't remember the phrase because I was so struck by it, the first thing I did was to call my Mom in North Carolina to assure her we were okay. I was afraid she'd see something like that and have heart failure. To be sure, the fires are bad - perhaps the worst in the history of the county (in total property losses, perhaps not, for which everyone is thankful), and very scary. However, the headlines throughout the week at Fox were done in the best tradition of yellow journalism. Intended to frighten, there was very little useful information. Perhaps if they had sent one of their journalists here to write some real stories, they could have had good site traffic without the need for the doom and gloom.

I think that my favorite headline of the week was "Firefighters all but give up..." I saw that and thought that the firefighters were going to just let the fire burn the county to the ground. The real story was that the thousands of firefighters were retreating where the fire was too intense, attempting to save structures, building fire breaks, etc. etc. Standard procedure for a firestorm. There are places where you have to let it go, because there is nothing you can do directly against the flames, but I wouldn't describe it as all but giving up.

Finally, to continue the misinformation, we have this headline: "Hunt for Firebug: Bounty offered for information leading to arrest of suspects responsible for setting historic Southern California wildfires." Well, the really historic fire is the Witch Creek fire in San Diego. Unfortunately, it appears to have been caused by a downed power line due to the high winds. When you click over to the story, you see the dateline of "San Diego", but the story is about a suspected arsonist in a 20,000 acre fire in Orange County. For sure a big fire, but not quite the scale of the 200,000 acre fire - which, again, is the "Historic" fire.

I've said for a long time that I'm not sure why any of us expect high standards from journalists. After all, the roots of journalism lie in the rags of the late 19th and early 20th century. If you want to know what fruit to expect, take a look at the roots. So, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this coverage after all.

Posted: Thursday - October 25, 2007 at 09:54 AM          

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