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So, I work for the State of Indiana. I've been at work every day this week helping respond to the huge snow and ice storm that hit much of the eastern US.
Part of my job is to monitor the media and to provide them with accurate information. Well, when the storm was approaching, things looked REALLY bad. Here in Indy, we were expecting 1.5 inches of ice, with another inch of sleet, and a few inches of snow. If that happened, things would have been shut down all week.
But they didn't happen that way. Don't get me wrong, the storm was bad. But central Indiana dodged a huge amount of the storm.
Around noon Tuesday, NOAA and NWS reports were showing that it would warm up a bit, and we would get much more sleet and much less ice. Various government agencies put this information out. But the weathermen didn't update their forecasts. They kept calling it the storm of the century, and predicting huge ice totals.
We gave them the benefit of the doubt at first. The information was new, and it takes a bit of effort to put the TV weather stuff together. So we didn't expect them to change their forecast for the noon news hour. But they didn't update their forecast at all that day.
At the 6pm news block, everyone was still claiming we would get over an inch of ice, but all the weather models showed that this wasn't true. When they showed the Doppler radar, if you knew a decent amount about weather, you could tell that we were going to get sleet and rain.
But they kept saying it was ice, and it would be devastating.
It wasn't. But again, the local news REFUSED to admit this.
Indianapolis did an amazing job of getting salt on the roads and keeping them clear. By Wednesday morning, the interstates were clear, and all main roads were in amazing shape. But the news kept saying that roads were all terrible.
Here in Indy, all the news stations are pretty much located within a few blocks of each other near downtown. All of the streets in that area were clear. 95% of the time when we get bad weather, they just send someone outside to show the roads in front of them. Well, they didn't want to show a perfectly clear road. So they drove away from downtown, to subdivisions and residential roads that were not plowed (by city policy to clear main roads first). And they claimed that ALL roads were like this. All the while, state officials were saying that main roads were great.
I didn't get it at first, until I realized that Sweeps week starts today.
For those of you that don't know, sweeps week is when ad rates are set for the year, so TV stations try to get breaking investigative reports and stuff to lure you in (this is also why new seasons of TV shows start about now).
So it became very obvious that the news here in Indy was intentionally withholding information to keep ratings up. The big school districts went on record saying that they made their decision to close schools today largely based on the information given by local news.
So schools are cancelled today, when streets are pretty damn good.
I've heard rumblings that Mitch Daniels is very upset with this. State and county government offices never closed for the storm. But the news kept saying that nobody should go to work and to stay inside.
I fully believe that these stations were trying to make the storm out to be much worse that it was to build ratings. If you can't go to work, you are more likely to watch the local news. And if you are afraid to go outside, you won't realize that the main roads are fine, and that the news crews are presenting the worst areas as if all roads are like this.
I find this odd because most people are aware of bias in national news sources like Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, but they think local news is better. People in this city are acting as if we had the worst storm in Indiana history, when the truth of the matter is, this isn't even the worst storm of the season. It amazes me how people will believe whatever they are told.
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