Hurricane Sandy Takes Its Time, Leaving TV News in an Endless Loop of Anticipation – NYTimes.com

One of the blessings of Hurricane Sandy, if there are any, is its status as a very slow moving weather event.

The lead time has given people in the affected area — a broad swath of the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic — days to make way for what is set to be a very destructive visitor. But people who turned on their televisions in search of up-to-date information could not be blamed for thinking that they had tuned into a storm-themed sequel to “Groundhog Day,” the film where a television weatherman, played by Bill Murray, wakes up to find the same day, running in replay, over and over.

Since Friday, and even before that, all-news channels and local TV stations in the areas in the hurricane’s path have had to find a different way to say the same thing over and over.

The people in the studio do the toss to the reporters in the wind/rain/surf who say the storm is bad and getting worse, and then it is back to the studio, where the anchors repeat the following information: Sandy is dangerous; if you have been told to evacuate you should (this from media outlets whose reporters are standing in or near menacing waves); and once the storm arrives, it will wreak significant havoc. (Poynter, the media news site, had seen enough clichés crashing onto the shore to make GIFs of the more ubiquitous ones — people stocking up on groceries, the God’s-eye satellite map of the storm itself and, of course, the reporter standing in the elements.)

via Hurricane Sandy Takes Its Time, Leaving TV News in an Endless Loop of Anticipation – NYTimes.com.