Poor Media Use of Weather Terminology

Ummmmmmmm....what?

I mentioned it in another thread but that's standard media terminology unless a tornado has been officially confirmed by NWS survey, even though it's really meant for situations where some storm damage occurred in the middle of the night or invisible inside a wall of rain. When a hundred chasers have video of a huge funnel flinging debris everywhere, then...<shrugs>.

I work as a newscast director for a local TV station, and I've told our producers to stop using that term when there's clear video of it. It usually comes to us in the boilerplate scripts that accompany national network video.
 
My favorite was on The Weather Channel decades ago:

The girl was trying to say “hot off the press” and she said “my hot little hands.”
 
It's kind of a dead horse at this point, isn't it? It's standard media practice to wait for NWS confirmation that a tornado occurred. Yes, it looks silly when there's spectacular video of it in progress. My station did this in our story about the Greenwood tornado this morning. I reminded our producer not to do that when there's clear video, but it'll probably keep happening.
 
It's kind of a dead horse at this point, isn't it? It's standard media practice to wait for NWS confirmation that a tornado occurred. Yes, it looks silly when there's spectacular video of it in progress. My station did this in our story about the Greenwood tornado this morning. I reminded our producer not to do that when there's clear video, but it'll probably keep happening.
Found another post about the Greenwood tornado (called as "funnel cloud" by AP)
 
Back
Top