PRESENT TENSE:ON MONDAY night, RTÉ news went live to New Orleans for the latest on the "storm of the century", Hurricane Gustav. There we found correspondent Robert Shortt on an empty street and wearing short-sleeves. He assured us that the winds were quite strong, but only a light breeze appeared to tickle his hair.
The first instinct, frankly, was to jeer. On his own in an abandoned city, save for a few stragglers and several thousand journalists, Shortt had waited for the great storm to arrive, only for it to wheeze a little as it hit the coast and then wheel away having proven itself to be rather unremarkable by global standards. This is not to detract from the fact that it was ultimately responsible for eight deaths in the US and havoc in several towns, but from a media perspective it was not the storm that had been promised, or which TV crews had anticipated and (let's be honest about this) probably hoped for.
So, while Shortt looked like he could have been holding a cocktail glass rather than a microphone, across the stations other reporters could be found in their sou'westers, hoods up, rain on the camera lens, wind scraping the microphones. It didn't matter that some of these pictures could have been filmed on a British or Irish street on any given day this summer.
The world's media had turned up and they were damn well keen to make the best of it.
The problem for television is that it's an expensive business, so when you send a crew to a story you want to use them. Last week, the US networks ordered extra fuel and food supplies and hired security details, then dispatched reporters and camera crews and eventually flew in their lead anchors for the big show itself. When the story failed to pan out as planned, it was important not to concede defeat, not to waste those valuable resources.
The problem for television is that when you have "News Alerts" exploding across the screen all day, you occasionally need a genuinely big story to justify the relentless hype. When catastrophe is a big lure for viewers, you don't want to be absent if it actually hits this time.
This is not so much of an issue for the print media, even though many newspapers went overboard too. When New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin promised that Gustav would be, no less, "the storm of the century", this was just what the media needed: an official legitimising of their hysteria. So what if it came from the mouth of someone whose meteorological training may be limited to licking his finger and sticking it in the air. For 24 hours, this was the "Storm of the Century". Except in Metro, which, finding this phrase too timid, preferred "Storm from Hell".
However, in an age when so many pictures are bought in from photographic agencies, and copy is supplied by news agencies, it's far easier - and less costly - for newspapers to relegate a story to the inside pages than for broadcasters to downgrade it.
The approach of Gustav was indeed a story. Three years after Katrina, it's understandable why there was so much advanced attention on New Orleans. The evacuation was also a significant development, although many within the media will surely wonder if they didn't become collaborators in a political strategy aimed at avoiding damage to certain people's reputations as much as to citizen's lives.
THERE HAS BEEN SOME comment about the media's priorities, especially given that Gustav killed 10 times as many people in the Caribbean. Many media outlets treated their suffering as being of secondary importance. And the storms which have since swept through the region, killing many more, arrived with advance notice, eroding any arguments about the world's media not being able to get cameras there in time to report on them.
Meanwhile, if they were interested in a catastrophic flood, Bihar in India had it all - homelessness, destruction, death, heartbreaking scenes. The reasons why such stories do not always make the news in this part of the world are regularly dissected, so I'm not going to do it again here, but it's still worth noting that on the same night that Robert Shortt was cooling his bare arms at the top of the news, the Indian story was several items further down that bulletin's pecking order.
Yet, the irony is that, whether it was by accident or design, Shortt's report turned out to have been among the most honest and valuable of them all. The story had been focused on New Orleans, and he was there regardless of how little damage had been done. The rest of the correspondents may have kept the macs on and gone chasing the rain, but it may be fair to say that most viewers on this side of the Atlantic probably didn't give a hoot if it banjaxed Biloxi or mashed Mobile. New Orleans was what they cared about.
Shortt's honesty was rare on Monday night. And if there is one last reason for that it's because it is not just the media which revels in catastrophe.
The public is attracted to it too - American catastrophe in particular. The media arrival had as much to do with market forces as much as natural ones, which is why they are unlikely to stop chasing the breeze any time soon.
