I watch one or the other Indianapolis television station nearly every morning just to see the most up-to-the-minute weather report.
I enjoy watching the weather guy or gal prance around in front of those big electronic maps — waving their arms like exotic interpretive dancers at symbols for storm fronts and high pressure zones and low pressure zones and wind gusts — all the while slyly gazing offscreen to parrot the teleprompter.
I feel strangely comforted by the confidence in their voices.
“Temperatures in metro Indianapolis will hit 30 degrees by noon today with a northwesterly wind at 25 miles an hour — so you had better cover your zinnias.” (Of course, it is mid-June and the accuracy is questionable, but the report is entertaining, although I don’t have zinnias.)
Even more worth watching are the times when the radar spots a typhoon in the South Pacific near Fiji and weather-folk have the joy of tracking it toward my house for days and warning me to be prepared to rush to my basement at any moment to save my life. And they plead with me to pass on the word to my “hearing-impaired” neighbors, which gives me purpose in life.
(By the way, just a tip: Do not warn your hearing-impaired neighbors until the typhoon is at least nearing Terre Haute and moving east. I find some of these impaired people are armed and can be very unpleasant if you wake them up early in the morning.)
Not being able to afford “The Disney Channel” or “Showtime,” I seriously am grateful to Indianapolis TV stations for the entertainment I get when my cat Scooby walks across my face at 5 a.m. to urge me toward the television remote.
Still, there is an emotional price to pay for the pleasure of watching the weather report. Crime news reports (not to mention sales pitches for replacement windows and hearing aids) are sandwiched between the floods and the tornadoes. Every channel’s early morning news seems to have turned into a televised version of the old “Police Gazette,” with a bit of home improvement and help for the “hearing impaired” thrown in.
“Now we switch live to Action News investigative reporter Joni Newshound on the scene on the near east side where two men armed with an unidentified weapon robbed a convenience store and made off with an undisclosed amount of Gatorade and two Milky Way candy bars.”
If I were not someone who visits Indianapolis often and knows convenience store robbers are not roaming the streets like swarms of locusts looking for Gatorade, I would be afraid to drive north of Southport. I would vote for State Representatives like Seymour’s Jim Lucas and advocate open carry bazookas to make the morning crime reports more interesting.
But, alas, I digress.
Indianapolis indeed does have a lot of incidents of violent crime, as does every city, town and village in the nation. It always has. And as a metropolitan area with more than 2 million residents — armed to the teeth by Second Amendment hysteria and a compliant General Assembly — violence may be more prevalent than in some past decades.
Still, I can’t help but believe the barrage of crime stories broadcast every day by Indianapolis TV stations between early morning weather reports has played a role in creating the “anti-city paranoia” I hear repeated in Columbus nearly every day.
Some of the crime stories reported indeed deserve top-of-mind treatment. Many other reports, I contend, are filler — minor incidents picked up by reporters on depleted news staffs to fill newscasts.
Balanced, in-depth reporting is both time consuming and expensive to generate. So, as a one-time newspaper reporter on small news staffs trying to fill the space every day in a printed newspaper, I know the struggle.
Police stations are generators and easy pick-up locations for cheap news — collected by the police and just awaiting delivery to the public by some reporter who can keyboard fast on a laptop.
Today, media staffs of all varieties have been shrunk to near extinction by the economics of competition, circulation decline and the oft-unreliable, but voraciously used internet sites.
I guess the risk of fear and paranoia are the price I must pay for the lopsided perspectives I get from violence-focused television news each morning. All I want is the entertainment, and knowing a typhoon just left Fiji on a dead course to my house.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. Contact him at [email protected].
