Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
There was a thunderstorm [Thursday] night. The 6:00 a.m. news [Friday] morning was comical. The Anchor ponderously intoned there was a storm last night and sent us to the Weatherman, who pointed to radar weather map as he told us the storm had left our area, then we cut to a pretty young woman standing in the rain on the side of a road as cars drove around a puddle, who breathlessly explained that the storm left standing water on some roadways.<\/p>\n
20 years ago, the Anchor would have said \u201cWell, that was some rain last night, a real gully washer. In sports, our Minnesota Twins will host the . . .\u201d and that would have been the end of it.<\/p>\n
This may explain the media penchant for going along with the global warming hype. 20 years ago the weather was just a section of the newscast. Now it’s become huge business, with it’s own teams, trucks, radar installations, even it’s own networks and network feeds that the locals contract from. So the weather forecasting industry has a vested interest in making everything spectacular, dangerous, dazzling, tittilating. Follow The Money – global warming is a natural fit for the whole expansion of the weather forecast industry.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Following the career of former Channel-11, current (I think) Channel 4 weatherman Paul Douglas is illustrative, as it’s pretty well tracked the growth of “Weatherman As Celebrity”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the eighties and nineties, Douglas’ side-line business – building weather-presentation software for broadast – was part and parcel of the growth of the Weather as Entertainment part of today’s newscasts; it brought action, zooming clouds, interaction between radar, maps and the presenter that made the weathercast seem like a little movie production of its own.\u00a0 It made Douglas pretty wealthy, I’m told – nothing wrong with that – and helped him become the Twin Cities’ first weather “celebrity”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And he was one of the first to board the Global Warming train.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: There was a thunderstorm [Thursday] night. The 6:00 a.m. news [Friday] morning was comical. The Anchor ponderously intoned there was a storm last night and sent us to the Weatherman, who pointed to radar weather map as he told us the storm had left our area, then we cut […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36887"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36894,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36887\/revisions\/36894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}