Someone needs to give CNN staff writers a meteorology lesson...

No, a book echo is the clunk that a bad novel makes after being heaved over the flanks of the Grand Canyon Wiley Coyote style;)

Loves, I have one for you. Now CNN does a great job, but somebody didn't have their coffee yet on 10/16/1999 at 3am Pacific time; when the Hector Mine quake jolted me out of bed in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I woke up and bolted to the phone to call my wide-awake sis in Los Ang. "You didn't get your big one did you????" Thank God, no. The epicenter of the 7.1 quake was a Marine base in the desert outside sparsely populated Twentynine Palms, CA.

As I was orienting myself in the bleary wee hours trying to get news on where the quake happened, CNN popped a map up on TV, showing the Southwestern United States. Oh no! It must have been a -really- large quake because CNN's map had New Mexico bordering Southern California. Arizona was nowhere to be found. New Mexico was under Utah and California's new neighbor. Poor Arizona! So at 3am, I called CNN. I really do live in Arizona, not the Territory, but America's 48th state. ;)
 
At the risk of incurring even more weather weenie wrath, cut them a little slack, will you? Let's see any of you try to put together a story for publication or broadcast under the kind of deadline pressure most journalists work under and have it error-free every time. I'm sure you could, as long as it involved storms or stormchasing. Hoorah for you, you nailed the semantic differences between funnel clouds and tornadoes.
Now do it again under the same pressures and constraints, but on a story, topic or situation on which you know absolutely nothing about. Depending on what cycle you're in, you've got at most a matter of hours to get there, track down interviews and information, identify all the salient points of the story, assemble it in to some coherent, linear structure people can understand, write it, make sure your info is correct, file it and then worry and hope like hell there wasn't something important you missed.
That night or the next day your story or feature is published or broadcast and you're feeling pretty good about it. You hustled and worked your ass off, you covered all the bases and produced a good, solid story under difficult circumstances. You then get a call or e-mail from some guy who calls you an idiot because you goofed on some obscure semantic detail that has no bearing at all on the overall accuracy of the story.
Reporters get this smug, belittling, infantile attitude daily. Most reporters are generalists. Unless they're on assignment from the New Yorker, their job is to report the news to a broad cross-section of readers, the type who by and large don't give a flip about the difference between a funnel cloud and a tornado. Should reporters always strive for accuracy? Of course, and I promise that any reporter worth their salt would use it correctly if they knew. The point is, that's the kind of detail that can very easily be overlooked when a story is being written and just because a reporter may have missed it shouldn't be cause for ad naseum ridicule.
If you're going to bash the media, bash it for any number of valid reasons, and to me mangling a few meteorological terms is somewhere way south of insignificant.
 
We're just having a little fun Chad. You do make good points though. I did some reporting myself for three years so I can laugh at myself too. I published an article once about a "cardiologist", who it turned out was not a cardiologist at all <oops>

But I didn't leave an entire state off the US map <ducking for cover>;)

Reporters earn their stripes in reality. We're just making light.
 
Speaking of New Mexico, what we get here pretty frequently is people who confuse us with Mexico. I've had people ask me if I need a visa to enter the USA. I was ordering something (on the phone) to be shipped a couple years ago, and the guy told me "Oh, sorry, we don't ship outside the USA".
 
I never saw this thread and I am sure it has gone off on a tangent by now, but on the Protection storm I sold my video to CNN and they posted it on their website with the title "Funnel goes over Protection Kansas". The video was a blatant tornado. We were real close and it was that drill bit at the ground kind of footage. Doesn't get any more obvious than that.
 
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