6 ms·

TV meteorologist objected to management’s ‘code red’ orders

83 points by sciurus 7y ago

foolzcrow 7y ago
Fair use says it's actually not their protected content. You just come from a long line of coward journalists that dont respect the 1st Amendment
deogeo 7y ago
The TV station is a private company, and has a right to publish, or refuse to publish, the material they want. Besides, free speech means you have a right to say anything you want - it doesn't protect you from the consequences, or give you a right to an audience. This xkcd says it best: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ /censorship_apologist
- raldi 7y ago
  I think this situation is a lot like the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" example.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Sorry, I was referring to the firing of the reporter, not the initial push for 'code red' reports.
    - save_ferris 7y ago
      The meteorologist made some very valid points, though. The Sinclair alert system isn’t clear and well-designed, unlike the long-standing NWS alert system. Indirectly related, but it’s worth reading up on some of the political battles being fought in the US meteorological world at the moment. An Accuweather executive, Barry Myers, was nominated to head the NOAA, which he’s spent years lobbying against to cut off public access to government weather data[0]. This story was featured in Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Fifth Risk, which documented instances where private companies are trying to block public access to various types of government data. Private interests are materially altering reporting systems that have worked for years, and many professional meteorologists are becoming more concerned about this influence. 0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-pick-to-lead-weather-agency-spent-30-years-fighting-it https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...
- bonniemuffin 7y ago
  Sinclair media owns most local TV stations in the US and uses them to shape public discourse in less-than-ethical ways. I think when local news has gotten as consolidated as it is, it ought to have some kind of obligation to the public, and shouldn't be able to hide behind "it's a private company" to justify bad behavior. John Oliver did an informative bit on Sinclair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Yes, this weather-report manipulation is the tip of the iceberg. The station managers get frequent directives from corporate management to hype more-or-less fake stories, and suppress other (real) stories, largely for political purposes. Before the FCC rescinded its balanced-reporting rules this sort of foolishness was contained, at the cost of sometimes requiring airing fringe lunacy. Now fringe lunacy is often the whole story.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Yes - that is why I ended my post with /censorship_apologist - to indicate it was meant to mock common arguments for censorship. Arguments that are only invoked when the speech being censored is unpopular.
  - ilaksh 7y ago
    Another candidate for antitrust action?
- quickben 7y ago
  So, why are we not closing stations for scheduled code red days on normal weather? They are lying to the public, but it doesn't seem there are any consequences for them, only for the employees that object to the lying.
csbrooks 7y ago
I guess I'm not super concerned, because I stopped watching TV news a long long time ago. In general they do everything they can to spread fear, and this is just an extension of that.
- xfitm3 7y ago
  I believe fear mongering has substantial long term negative mental health effects - something I hope will be addressed in my lifetime.
- krapp 7y ago
  It's not really about spreading fear, per se, it's marketing. Stations want their weather team portrayed as the most accurate and most dependable with the most cutting edge 3D no 4D no HYPERCUBIC storm tracking technology. They want viewers to rely on their station alone for weather forecasts simply as a means of ensuring viewership and increasing the value of their ad time, so they make those forecasts seem as critically important as possible. It's the same phenomenon that leads to all news being breaking news.
- bonniemuffin 7y ago
  Does it worry you that this kind of fear-mongering might be bad for society even if it doesn't impact you personally? You might not watch the local news, but many other people do.
  - entropea 7y ago
    It's just corporate media who no longer cares about informing the public in seek of profits. It guarantees a watcher all day to consume ads, on edge about extreme events to stay tuned and consume ads, while also normalizing severity. These things are already put out on TV, Radio, and over many SAME alerts by NWS in the event that there is a real emergency. There is also the easy to read convective outlook. https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/ https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/
tyingq 7y ago
Their corporate contact email: comments@sbgi.net
js2 7y ago
AFAICT there's no universally agreed upon meteorological definition for "code red day." Rather, this is just something Sinclair made up for "risk of severe weather." A "code red" is also used to refer to air quality[1]. And fire risk[2]. There's also the CodeRED alert system[3]. So since this is just made up by Sinclair and doesn't have any technical definiton, what's this guy complaining about? This is Sinclair after all. 1. https://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/programs/health/Pages/coderedabout.aspx https://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/programs/health/Pages... 2. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/dc/3rd-code-red-air-quality-day-i.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/dc/3rd-... 3. https://www.onsolve.com/solutions/products/codered/ https://www.onsolve.com/solutions/products/codered/
- greenyoda 7y ago
  The problem is that most of the people who are watching don't know that "code red" has no real meaning, and they may decide what action to take based on what the TV station says. Those actions could end up being costly and unnecessary. As the article says toward the end: > Other meteorologists aren’t a fan of proprietary alert days to begin with, expressing reluctance toward alerts that don’t originate from the National Weather Service. > “To me, the best option is communicating the risks issued by the Storm Prediction Center,” wrote Kit Cloninger, weekend meteorologist at KSNB in Hastings, Neb. “It’s simple, and consistency is key with broadcasting. Otherwise, viewers may wonder why one station issued an ‘alert day’ while another one didn’t.” > Jamie Moker, a University of Arizona researcher working on improving weather modeling, agrees. > “Branding is not universal across all stations,” he wrote. After all, the National Weather Service already has more than 100 types of weather alerts it can issue. Moker argued that the solution isn’t for stations to create more alerts but to work on communicating existing ones.
  - js2 7y ago
    Since the term has no real meaning, maybe desensitizing people to it by overusing it is the best outcome. I'd honestly be surprised if people acted on these faux alerts. I think folks are pretty used to local stations claiming just about everything is urgent, breaking, and important.
PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
"Code red?" That doesn't even mean anything! Where is the word "weather" in that? Or "severe?" Or whatever it is that they're pretending to convey? This is about as cravenly stupid as California's "red flag alert." WTF does that mean? Red flags will be falling from the sky, snarling traffic and causing mayhem? Human stupidity is boundless.
- threezero 7y ago
  “Red flag” actual has a legal meaning in California. Several places have restrictions that come into effect on Red Flag fire days, including no parking areas where vehicles can be preemptively towed because they may impede the fire trucks.
brown9-2 7y ago
Living in the northeast US I have never heard of a “code red day”. Is this a regional thing?
- joncrane 7y ago
  It's a Sinclair news thing. If you don't watch your local Fox affiliate for your local news, you'd never see it, regardless of what part of the country you're in.
nimbius 7y ago
>Crain was not seen delivering the weather on air Thursday morning, and his bio has since been removed from the company site. Torossian declined to discuss Crain’s employment status Friday afternoon, stating that “our policy is to not comment on individual personnel matters.” Christ its as if someones exhumed the corpse of Stalin.
jl2718 7y ago
I see this going in the direction of hiring models to deliver a fully-scripted weather report full of ads and politics and sex appeal with almost zero weather-related content.
will4274 7y ago
This article is a study in the death of old news. It leads the reader towards a simple clickbaity conclusion "Sinclair bad, meteorologists good" but it doesn't come close to providing enough information to the reader or show any sign of independent investigation. Basic facts that would inform the reader, like "how many days a year are 'code red'?" are missing. On one of the core points of contention - does corporation decide when a day is code red or do the meteorologists decide - we hear from a single meteorologist and a single corporate spokesperson who give opposite answers, but the reporter (Matthew Cappucci) apparently couldn't be bothered to call a few more Sinclair meteorologists (off the record) and figure out who was telling the truth and who was lying. Instead, readers are left to infer based on their previous biases - which, if you look at the comment section on WaPo's website - they have no problem doing. Does this even count as journalism?
ducttape12 7y ago
I heard a great quote once: Local news exists to scare the elderly.
ilaksh 7y ago
I actually see a parallel between this and the Boeing Max issue. Management's job is to make money. Since they don't actually do the work, they have a limited number of options for doing that. And they are not judged on the quality of the work, since someone else did it, only how much money the company makes. They need people to watch the station. So they came to the conclusion that ratings would increase if they created a sense of emergency. Even if it's a totally false emergency. This is actually a public safety issue, because it means that viewers may not be able to determine when there is an actual emergency. In the case of Boeing, the pressure to make more money caused executives to decide to implement a half-assed upgrade rather than do the new design work and have to recertify the safety of the new plane. It seems that the pressure to increase profits frequently overrides integrity. I don't know how you're going to change that, because executives are only rewarded for making more money, not for integrity or anything else. One option would be to place these executives in prison for endangering public safety. That's not going to resolve the core structural issue of profit conflicting with safety.

83 points by sciurus 7y ago

Fair use says it's actually not their protected content. You just come from a long line of coward journalists that dont respect the 1st Amendment

deogeo 7y ago

The TV station is a private company, and has a right to publish, or refuse to publish, the material they want. Besides, free speech means you have a right to say anything you want - it doesn't protect you from the consequences, or give you a right to an audience. This xkcd says it best: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ /censorship_apologist

raldi 7y ago
I think this situation is a lot like the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" example.
- deogeo 7y ago
  Sorry, I was referring to the firing of the reporter, not the initial push for 'code red' reports.
  - save_ferris 7y ago
    The meteorologist made some very valid points, though. The Sinclair alert system isn’t clear and well-designed, unlike the long-standing NWS alert system. Indirectly related, but it’s worth reading up on some of the political battles being fought in the US meteorological world at the moment. An Accuweather executive, Barry Myers, was nominated to head the NOAA, which he’s spent years lobbying against to cut off public access to government weather data[0]. This story was featured in Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Fifth Risk, which documented instances where private companies are trying to block public access to various types of government data. Private interests are materially altering reporting systems that have worked for years, and many professional meteorologists are becoming more concerned about this influence. 0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-pick-to-lead-weather-agency-spent-30-years-fighting-it https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...
bonniemuffin 7y ago
Sinclair media owns most local TV stations in the US and uses them to shape public discourse in less-than-ethical ways. I think when local news has gotten as consolidated as it is, it ought to have some kind of obligation to the public, and shouldn't be able to hide behind "it's a private company" to justify bad behavior. John Oliver did an informative bit on Sinclair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Yes, this weather-report manipulation is the tip of the iceberg. The station managers get frequent directives from corporate management to hype more-or-less fake stories, and suppress other (real) stories, largely for political purposes. Before the FCC rescinded its balanced-reporting rules this sort of foolishness was contained, at the cost of sometimes requiring airing fringe lunacy. Now fringe lunacy is often the whole story.
- deogeo 7y ago
  Yes - that is why I ended my post with /censorship_apologist - to indicate it was meant to mock common arguments for censorship. Arguments that are only invoked when the speech being censored is unpopular.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Another candidate for antitrust action?
quickben 7y ago
So, why are we not closing stations for scheduled code red days on normal weather? They are lying to the public, but it doesn't seem there are any consequences for them, only for the employees that object to the lying.

csbrooks 7y ago

I guess I'm not super concerned, because I stopped watching TV news a long long time ago. In general they do everything they can to spread fear, and this is just an extension of that.

xfitm3 7y ago
I believe fear mongering has substantial long term negative mental health effects - something I hope will be addressed in my lifetime.
krapp 7y ago
It's not really about spreading fear, per se, it's marketing. Stations want their weather team portrayed as the most accurate and most dependable with the most cutting edge 3D no 4D no HYPERCUBIC storm tracking technology. They want viewers to rely on their station alone for weather forecasts simply as a means of ensuring viewership and increasing the value of their ad time, so they make those forecasts seem as critically important as possible. It's the same phenomenon that leads to all news being breaking news.
bonniemuffin 7y ago
Does it worry you that this kind of fear-mongering might be bad for society even if it doesn't impact you personally? You might not watch the local news, but many other people do.
- entropea 7y ago
  It's just corporate media who no longer cares about informing the public in seek of profits. It guarantees a watcher all day to consume ads, on edge about extreme events to stay tuned and consume ads, while also normalizing severity. These things are already put out on TV, Radio, and over many SAME alerts by NWS in the event that there is a real emergency. There is also the easy to read convective outlook. https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/ https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/

tyingq 7y ago

Their corporate contact email: comments@sbgi.net

js2 7y ago

AFAICT there's no universally agreed upon meteorological definition for "code red day." Rather, this is just something Sinclair made up for "risk of severe weather." A "code red" is also used to refer to air quality[1]. And fire risk[2]. There's also the CodeRED alert system[3]. So since this is just made up by Sinclair and doesn't have any technical definiton, what's this guy complaining about? This is Sinclair after all. 1. https://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/programs/health/Pages/coderedabout.aspx https://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/programs/health/Pages... 2. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/dc/3rd-code-red-air-quality-day-i.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/dc/3rd-... 3. https://www.onsolve.com/solutions/products/codered/ https://www.onsolve.com/solutions/products/codered/

greenyoda 7y ago
The problem is that most of the people who are watching don't know that "code red" has no real meaning, and they may decide what action to take based on what the TV station says. Those actions could end up being costly and unnecessary. As the article says toward the end: > Other meteorologists aren’t a fan of proprietary alert days to begin with, expressing reluctance toward alerts that don’t originate from the National Weather Service. > “To me, the best option is communicating the risks issued by the Storm Prediction Center,” wrote Kit Cloninger, weekend meteorologist at KSNB in Hastings, Neb. “It’s simple, and consistency is key with broadcasting. Otherwise, viewers may wonder why one station issued an ‘alert day’ while another one didn’t.” > Jamie Moker, a University of Arizona researcher working on improving weather modeling, agrees. > “Branding is not universal across all stations,” he wrote. After all, the National Weather Service already has more than 100 types of weather alerts it can issue. Moker argued that the solution isn’t for stations to create more alerts but to work on communicating existing ones.
- js2 7y ago
  Since the term has no real meaning, maybe desensitizing people to it by overusing it is the best outcome. I'd honestly be surprised if people acted on these faux alerts. I think folks are pretty used to local stations claiming just about everything is urgent, breaking, and important.

PunksATawnyFill 7y ago

"Code red?" That doesn't even mean anything! Where is the word "weather" in that? Or "severe?" Or whatever it is that they're pretending to convey? This is about as cravenly stupid as California's "red flag alert." WTF does that mean? Red flags will be falling from the sky, snarling traffic and causing mayhem? Human stupidity is boundless.

threezero 7y ago
“Red flag” actual has a legal meaning in California. Several places have restrictions that come into effect on Red Flag fire days, including no parking areas where vehicles can be preemptively towed because they may impede the fire trucks.

brown9-2 7y ago

Living in the northeast US I have never heard of a “code red day”. Is this a regional thing?

joncrane 7y ago
It's a Sinclair news thing. If you don't watch your local Fox affiliate for your local news, you'd never see it, regardless of what part of the country you're in.

nimbius 7y ago

>Crain was not seen delivering the weather on air Thursday morning, and his bio has since been removed from the company site. Torossian declined to discuss Crain’s employment status Friday afternoon, stating that “our policy is to not comment on individual personnel matters.” Christ its as if someones exhumed the corpse of Stalin.

jl2718 7y ago

I see this going in the direction of hiring models to deliver a fully-scripted weather report full of ads and politics and sex appeal with almost zero weather-related content.

will4274 7y ago

This article is a study in the death of old news. It leads the reader towards a simple clickbaity conclusion "Sinclair bad, meteorologists good" but it doesn't come close to providing enough information to the reader or show any sign of independent investigation. Basic facts that would inform the reader, like "how many days a year are 'code red'?" are missing. On one of the core points of contention - does corporation decide when a day is code red or do the meteorologists decide - we hear from a single meteorologist and a single corporate spokesperson who give opposite answers, but the reporter (Matthew Cappucci) apparently couldn't be bothered to call a few more Sinclair meteorologists (off the record) and figure out who was telling the truth and who was lying. Instead, readers are left to infer based on their previous biases - which, if you look at the comment section on WaPo's website - they have no problem doing. Does this even count as journalism?

ducttape12 7y ago

I heard a great quote once: Local news exists to scare the elderly.

ilaksh 7y ago

I actually see a parallel between this and the Boeing Max issue. Management's job is to make money. Since they don't actually do the work, they have a limited number of options for doing that. And they are not judged on the quality of the work, since someone else did it, only how much money the company makes. They need people to watch the station. So they came to the conclusion that ratings would increase if they created a sense of emergency. Even if it's a totally false emergency. This is actually a public safety issue, because it means that viewers may not be able to determine when there is an actual emergency. In the case of Boeing, the pressure to make more money caused executives to decide to implement a half-assed upgrade rather than do the new design work and have to recertify the safety of the new plane. It seems that the pressure to increase profits frequently overrides integrity. I don't know how you're going to change that, because executives are only rewarded for making more money, not for integrity or anything else. One option would be to place these executives in prison for endangering public safety. That's not going to resolve the core structural issue of profit conflicting with safety.