Hurricane reporters can get caught up in story

All hail America’s hurricane reporters. Their brand of courage is truly unique.

In Florida, millions of dislocated people were going home in the aftermath of Hurricane Frances just long enough to survey the wreckage of their lives before piling into their vehicles again to escape Hurricane Ivan – and now they are waiting for Jeanne. Yet as they flee the latest storm, they’ll pass hurricane reporters heading the other way.

These warriors travel with hardy camera crews, near-indestructible sound equipment and water-resistant lights, and they have great slickers.

We are grateful for the images captured by the hurricane reporters’ camera operators — washed-out bridges, capsized yachts, lampposts bent like pipe cleaners. If we saw only those images, meteorologists’ reports, radar maps and occasional dispatches from reporters inside storm shelters and vans, we’d have a vivid sense of this disaster’s breadth and scope.

But the intrepid hurricane reporter goes further. Not content to let pictures tell the story, he makes himself the story.

He goes live during weather conditions so dangerous that you half expect the camera to pan right and reveal an ark. He answers questions he can barely hear and summarizes information that could just as easily be narrated over storm footage from inside the relative safety of a truck.

If you think this kind of showboating is pointless, you’re not alone. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, who’s been reporting live from Florida, seems to be having a hard time keeping a straight face. It’s as if some part of him rebels at the prospect of enacting a TV news cliche so stupid that if it did not exist, “The Daily Show” would invent it.

As Hurricane Frances made landfall, Cooper interviewed weather expert Chad Myers of the American Meteorological Society while being lashed by Old Testament rain. The anchors in Atlanta read Cooper a piece of viewer e-mail asking if wildlife go for shelter during a hurricane. The question spurred Cooper to recall “someone from the state basically saying that a lot of the cows, animals, horses seek higher ground, sort of instinctively.”

Myers seconded the anecdote with one about driving Florida’s Route 1 and seeing “a flock of birds that almost made the sky black, and they all took off and they all flew west. And I thought, ‘These guys know where they’re going. Why am I going the other way?’ “

“I’m here with Mr. Science,” Cooper ad-libbed, cracking up the anchors.

Ah, hurricanes. They’re not just forces of nature that crush homes like milk cartons, displace 2.8 million people and relegate another 90,000 to storm shelters. They also serve as a backdrop for light comic banter.

Self-aggrandizement, too. On Fox News Channel, Geraldo Rivera made like a presidential candidate, visiting storm-tossed towns and counties and spreading his own personal message of hope.

Reporting live from Stuart, Fla., Rivera introduced footage of himself comforting displaced senior citizens at the Doubletree where he was staying.

Judging from the clip, the “comforting” part consisted of walking around in the lobby and letting people recognize him. He said Hurricane Frances subjected seniors to “more pressure, more disorientation, more kind of a bad vibe” — the same emotions I feel watching Rivera.

During the same report, Rivera produced a storm survivor. And I do mean produced: He had the guy wait behind a palm tree until Rivera told him to step into view and tell a story about finding a brand new, apparently functioning refrigerator.

“By the grace of God, if I turn it on tomorrow, it’ll be running,” he told Rivera.

The following day, Rivera donned Crayola yellow coveralls given to him by the concierge at the Doubletree and met up with fellow Fox News correspondent Rick Leventhal, who taped himself rescuing a Floridian from a partly submerged car. Although Leventhal wisely refused to assume he’d saved the man’s life, the rescue narrative still left a sour aftertaste. Journalism was not invented to record the exploits of reporters.

Some correspondents and meteorologists did sober, intelligent work, including Fox News’ Adam Housely and Jonathan Serrie; the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore, Stephanie Abrams and Jeff Morrow; and MSNBC’s weather specialist Sean McLaughlin, who explained the mechanics of Frances and Ivan in plain language.

But they were eclipsed by hurricane action figures and by the ominous drumbeat of the news channels’ horror movie music and graphics. By Sunday, when Frances was downgraded to tropical storm status, an impatient CNN had already put up the title, “Awaiting Ivan.”

On with the show.