“You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows,”
Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan
FNC’s “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocey did a piece on the “War over the Weather” this morning in advance of Friday’s United Nations report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with guest Sen. James Inhofe, ranking minority member on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (and formerly its highly underqualified chair), so Inhofe could once again hold forth on his views on climate change and global warming, namely, that it’s entirely normal and natural and not at all a man-based problem and anyone who suggests otherwise is a nefarious tool of the radical left. For his part, Doocey offered leading questions which also called out the “left wing”, creating a segment that was actually not at all unlike an informercial.
Does The Weather Channel (TWC) have a political agenda? Well, yes. It’s a business and makes money from advertising. But when Fox News Channel (FNC) accuses it of a “far left agenda” because its meteorologists acknowledge global warming, the implication of the finger pointers is that they are free of their own bias. I never thought weather could become a Rorschach test of ideology, but I suppose in a Stalinist political environment, anything is possible. For a clear understanding of how the FNC gyroscope is spun by Republican operatives, filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed documentary is an excellent case study of how precisely reality can be constructed by a news agency. Debunking the human contribution to global warming is akin to viewing humans as beings who eat but never excrete.
You need a weatherman to tell which way the digital wind blows
TWC represents itself through multiple segments and the ads it sells. But for the sake of analysis, I’ll focus on the network’s chief communicator, the weatherperson.
Technorati Tags: Fox News Channel, Katrina, Weather Channel, weather
Art Silverblatt (Media Literacy: Keys to Interpreting Media Messages) observes, “We generally assume that the person in front of the camera or microphone is the person responsible for what is being said. However, this person often is only a performer or model who has been instructed what to say or how to look by someone who is not visible to the audience.” TWC has 30 on-cameral meteorologists, six extreme weather experts (for severe storms) and an assortment of reporters who go out on the scene. Thomas De Zengotita (Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It) observes that TWC weatherpeople are “somehow smaller, less intrusive, more modest than newscasters. ” Experts, he claims, say that motion keeps viewers from clicking away; TWC on-camera personnel have very calming, “hypnotic” hand gestures.
Like nightly news broadcasts on other networks, he’s superimposed against a blue-screen that changes graphics, off to the right of the screen, his figure slightly cut by the edge of my TV. Though he is not the star attraction (the weather is), his position in relationship to the graphics is telling. As they alternate, often with computer-generated representations of weather patterns that twirl and glide across the simulated landscape, he stands before us like an omniscient narrator, the literary equivalent of God. In relation to the landscape, he is enormous, overpowering, and all-seeing. He commands the point-of-view, and has the ability to switch it at will. He is a time-space traveler, a master of nature and the world, the recipient and disseminator of highly specialized knowledge. He is the technological equivalent of a shaman.
The graphics at his disposal are worth noting. Though the broadcast I monitored did show a clip of Rome (the Pope was on his deathbed at the time), it otherwise focused on regions of the United States, with its national territory clearly demarcated. Mapping the territory in such a way makes the obvious statement that weather has a national characteristic. Obviously, this version of TWC (it has five international formats, including Latin American) is addressing viewers in the United States, but demarcating international (and state) boundaries is meant to orient the viewer, prioritizing boundaries as location. This is different than graphic representations of maps on international flights, which omit borders in order to not invoke geopolitical strife. Media technology is important in creating a “national picture” (literally), which in turn serves a greater ideology of nationalism. Andrew Ross (Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits) notes that “the weather” has an ideological component in that “changes from weather from day to day are our most palpable contact with the social phenomenon of change.” We tend to link it with national mood, or God’s will, if you will; and for the longest time, with women (a whole other discussion).
The most dominant aesthetic quality of TWC is its display of high-tech prowess. Though the production itself is opaque, through commentary we are made aware of the gadgetry involved with delivering the information: satellite, radar, vast networks of reporters/experts and uplinks. The computational power required to render weather (which remains highly complex and too variable for easy computation) is immense and expensive, but is increasingly simplified, as PCs get more powerful. Consequently, it’s more common now to see 3-D fly-throughs. Realism, of course, is how television is able lay claim to the real; live video in particular has a tautological component of realism. Statistics and jargon are used too for technical and professional effect. There is never any doubt that what you are seeing is based on science, despite weather forecasting remaining an interpretive art.
Tags: Media, News, Weekly Deconstruction
