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                    <span itemprop="headline">Why You Can’t Take Your Eyes Off the Hurricane</span>
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    <p class="timestamp"><time itemprop="datePublished" datetime='2017-09-11T07:09-0400'>September 11, 2017</time></p>
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<style type="text/css">.cms-textAlign-left{text-align:left;}.cms-textAlign-center{text-align:center;}.cms-textAlign-right{text-align:right;}.cms-magazineStyles-smallCaps{font-variant:small-caps;}.cms-playbookStyle-rubric{color:#b70000;font-weight:bold;font-family:sans-serif;}</style><p>What possesses us to consume massive amounts of disaster coverage? Why did Hurricane Irma burn up the <a href="http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/daily-ratings/thursday-cable-ratings-sept-7-2017/" target="_blank">TV ratings</a>? </p>
<p> For those in the path of the storm, rubbernecking makes sense. We seek news we can use that will keep us alive: Will the storm hit us? When? What sort of damage will result? TV traditionally supplies the best and most immediate answers to those questions. Likewise, nobody will criticize binge-watchers who have relatives or friends in the hurricane/fire/tornado/earthquake’s zone of destruction or own property in its path. </p><p class="story-continued">Story Continued Below</p>
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 <p>But lacking a personal context for viewing, it’s hard to justify having camped out in front of the TV from Friday night until Monday morning to view Hurricane Irma’s wake, something I did. Of course, I worry about our countrymen wherever and whenever peril besieges them. But that doesn’t fully explain my fascination. The quick answer, we watch because we dig disaster porn, doesn’t do it, either. It merely spawns the companion question, “But why, then, do we love disaster porn?”</p>
<p>Alexander Cockburn attempted to peel this lethal fruit in May 1974, penning a Swiftian piece titled “Death Rampant! Readers Rejoice!” for the upstart journalism review<i> [MORE]</i>. Cockburn sourced our enthrallment to the inherent drama of disasters, especially disasters that give some warning of their approach—like hurricanes, floods, tsunamis and fires—and then unfold over time. Always erring on the side of safety and caution, government authorities tend to portray cataclysms they’ve sighted in their radars, especially hurricanes, as potentially the worst ever. The press always amplifies this message, juicing everybody’s anticipation. It also provides previews of that coming destruction by broadcasting footage of how the storm has shattered an island downwind. Previews like these fully prime the audience for the main course. Turn off Netflix! Disconnect the Xbox! Mute the phone! Who <i>wouldn’t </i>want to watch what promises to be the most powerful hurricane to have ever hit the United States?</p>
<p>Hurricanes Harvey and Irma played out like three-act dramas. The coverage of whether specific residents would stay or evacuate took up the better part of Act 1, building suspense. The arriving storm dominated Act 2, as the networks delivered video dread: The water breached the seawalls, the traffic signs went airborne, the trees mauled power lines and roads became tributaries. Act 3 brought together the loose ends of Acts 1 and 2. The separated were reunited (or not). The recovery commenced. The president visited. The hungry were fed. The innocent mourned nature’s destruction. Because Irma was an inordinately large storm, its Act 3 opened in Miami as its Act 2 progressed in Tampa. (Not to be a stinker about it, but didn’t you sense the waves of disappointment that swept CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo when Irma turned out to bring only a sub-Biblical flood?)</p>
<p>Sudden disasters that don’t provide advance notice (earthquakes, airline crashes and building collapses, for example) go directly to Act 2. They still toss off ample drama as the cameras go directly to the scene to capture the uplift of rescue (especially pets), the tragedy of death or the sweetness of human compassion. Journalists become changed people during a disaster. It’s an unspoken rule among them to suppress the cynicism common to their profession as long as the story dominates the news. Once the story moves off Page One, they can revert to normal. </p>
<p>Cockburn deplored the conventions of disaster reporting, especially the way U.S. editors frame disasters. In his calculus, American editors would report the death of three Americans as a disaster but would require 10 times as many deaths of Northern Europeans to warrant similar coverage. For Latin America and Asia disasters, the ratios must escalate to 1 to 100 and 1 to 1,000, respectively, for coverage. In the main, Cockburn’s point still holds: Just compare the U.S. coverage of Harvey and Irma to its scant coverage of the more devastating floods in South Asia. But when Cockburn wrote his piece in 1974, video response wasn’t global and the Web didn’t exist. Disaster was mostly a newspaper game. Today, news satellites can bring us disaster stories taking place outside U.S. borders almost immediately, giving them additional immediacy. Thanks to satellites and the Web, the manmade disasters that took place on the streets of Paris, London, Brussels and Barcelona commanded U.S. attention in a way would have been impossible in the mid-1970s.</p>
<p>The disaster form fascinates us because it lends itself so easily to storytelling. This is a truth Hollywood has long acknowledged, especially in recent decades by producing such movies as <i>Earthquake</i>, <i>Armageddon</i>, <i>The Day After Tomorrow</i>, <i>Volcano</i>, <i>The Perfect Storm</i>, <i>Contagion</i>, <i>The Towering Inferno</i>, <i>Titanic</i>, <i>War of the Worlds</i>, <i>Shaun of the Dead</i>, <i>Dr. Strangelove</i>, et al. Lives lost, lives saved by heroes, lives teetering in the balance always make for great entertainment. When broadcast as news, Cockburn wrote, disasters excite loyal viewership, which in turn pleases advertisers. This inspires TV (and print) executives to throw away the budget when disaster comes to town. Coverage of a major disaster almost always wins the hometown paper a Pulitzer Prize, even when the coverage isn’t especially notable. These prizes aren’t for the best story, as my frenemy Tim Noah puts it. They’re for the best disaster.</p>
<p>When you stop thinking of disaster coverage as news and start to think of it as high-stakes reality TV with high production values, its allure becomes apparent. Who can turn away from a spectacular story in which nothing is preordained? There’s a reason why most holy books fill their pages with stories about catastrophes.</p>
<p><i>******</i></p>
<p><i>CNN’s Chris Cuomo looked like the Hulk in that T-shirt, didn’t he? Send storm warnings to <a href="mailto:shafer.politico@gmail.com" target="_blank">Shafer.Politico@gmail.com</a>. My <a href="http://politico.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=26f1798168150c8a8ed512264&amp;id=151813914f" target="_blank">email alerts</a> watched the Weather Channel, my <a href="https://twitter.com/jackshafer" target="_blank">Twitter</a> feed CNN, but my <a href="http://www.politico.com/rss/jackshafer.xml" target="_blank">RSS</a> feed searched Twitter for <a href="https://twitter.com/jillianmele/status/906894255381250049" target="_blank">video like this</a>.</i></p><div class="story-share ">
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