Wed, June 11, 2003

Does anyone remember the Summer of the Shark? A few years back, there was a statistically insignificant jump in the numbers of shark attacks off Florida's coasts and the news media went crazy about it. Well, this Monday was a bit of a slow news day, which in the case of a newspaper or local broadcast isn't very much. But when you've got 24 hours of live news to generate, you're prepared to dig deep to fill that air. Martha Stewart's news cycle was subsiding and Hillary's book wasn't due out for another day, so CNN did some scouring and came up with... rip tides!

Over the weekend a handful of people drowned off Florida's gulf coast due to rip currents and rip tides. I don't know the statistics so I can't say whether it was an inordinate handful. And while I certainly wouldn't dismiss their deaths as trivial, neither do I think that those fatalities herald the Attack of Rip Tides. In fact, I wonder if former CNN bureau chief Larry LaMotte hadn't been among the drowned would the story even have registered on CNN's radar?

Either way, the hastily assembled report on the dangers of rip tides and rip currents was a comical sight to behold. Incomprehensible graphics and stupefying advice like "know how to swim" defined the haphazard description of rip current physics and ocean dynamics. One diagram was so poorly constructed that it actually seemed to indicate that the rushing currents in a rip tide gradually make their way back to shore, prompting Miles O'Brien to ask whether victims should just float peacefully and wait to wash ashore. Ha! Maybe they'll wash ashore in Galveston!

Oh, well. As Stephen Colbert says, the beauty of broadcast news is that it's gone as soon as it goes out over the air. CNN can rumble forward tomorrow with Hillary related news and ImClone CEO's Sam Waksal's guilty plea without a backward look.

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