Irene Hysteria: Think Peter and the Wolf

When it comes to hurricane Irene the Media acted as they did with Orson Welles, "War of the Worlds" and fed a Needless Panic Over Irene. The sad part about it is they totally refuse to change what they are doing and still one Irene story after another.

If you wanted to see a text book example of how to run a story into the ditch then Irene was that story. There was nothing that the viewing audience didn't learn about Irene other then the minor fact that hurricanes have a track record of dying out in colder water.

Amazing as it might be the one item that was not ran over and over and over for days was that minor little detail. Guess what! As soon as it started to hit colder water the hurricane began to run out of steam and became a class one storm.

Deadly and wet but not worthy of 24 hour coverage. The media driven by cable news generated a hysteria that overwhelmed what was an modestly destructive storm. Estimated at 3 billion in damages but at least twice that amount lost revenue for those that shut down to this hysteria.

Homes can be rebuilt. Roads can be rebuilt and power grids come back on line as they always do in the event of natural or man made disasters. The lost revenue can never be made up.

It will take days to get planes back to the airports, trains in operation and business reopened that never had to be shut down to begin with. When a news story is done you don't base it on what if, could be or might happen. You base it on hard facts that just were not there for any but the media whom seemed to have tunnel vision on this story.

How many deaths were caused by the hype that surrounded the hurricane? How many people went out to see the storm of the century that our president had said might be of historic proportions. No one will ever know the answer to this question, but it does deserve an response.

Rule of thumb in all bad weather is to always rule in favor of caution. When caution becomes hysteria driven by a rating driven media the rule of thumb is therefore thrown out the window. The panic ran stores out of water ,food batteries and flashlights long before the storm even began.

The media has infact became a joke to those that have suffered thru major hurricanes, fire, earthquakes and other disasters. Those that have been subjected to the endless barrage of gobbly gook that was forced up them by the media deserve an apology that they of course will not get.

The one redeeming thing about this mess if you can call it redeeming is that it served to remind people that there are other things to do rather then to spend days listening to media hyped up events