TV meteorologist objected to management’s ‘code red’ orders
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
So since this is just made up by Sinclair and doesn't have any technical definiton, what's this guy complaining about? This is Sinclair after all.
1. https://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/programs/health/Pages...
2. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/dc/3rd-...
As the article says toward the end:
> Other meteorologists aren’t a fan of proprietary alert days to begin with, expressing reluctance toward alerts that don’t originate from the National Weather Service.
> “To me, the best option is communicating the risks issued by the Storm Prediction Center,” wrote Kit Cloninger, weekend meteorologist at KSNB in Hastings, Neb. “It’s simple, and consistency is key with broadcasting. Otherwise, viewers may wonder why one station issued an ‘alert day’ while another one didn’t.”
> Jamie Moker, a University of Arizona researcher working on improving weather modeling, agrees.
> “Branding is not universal across all stations,” he wrote. After all, the National Weather Service already has more than 100 types of weather alerts it can issue. Moker argued that the solution isn’t for stations to create more alerts but to work on communicating existing ones.
I'd honestly be surprised if people acted on these faux alerts. I think folks are pretty used to local stations claiming just about everything is urgent, breaking, and important.
There is a separate system for sending alerts to cell phones:
Management's job is to make money. Since they don't actually do the work, they have a limited number of options for doing that. And they are not judged on the quality of the work, since someone else did it, only how much money the company makes.
They need people to watch the station. So they came to the conclusion that ratings would increase if they created a sense of emergency. Even if it's a totally false emergency. This is actually a public safety issue, because it means that viewers may not be able to determine when there is an actual emergency.
In the case of Boeing, the pressure to make more money caused executives to decide to implement a half-assed upgrade rather than do the new design work and have to recertify the safety of the new plane.
It seems that the pressure to increase profits frequently overrides integrity. I don't know how you're going to change that, because executives are only rewarded for making more money, not for integrity or anything else.
One option would be to place these executives in prison for endangering public safety. That's not going to resolve the core structural issue of profit conflicting with safety.
They want viewers to rely on their station alone for weather forecasts simply as a means of ensuring viewership and increasing the value of their ad time, so they make those forecasts seem as critically important as possible. It's the same phenomenon that leads to all news being breaking news.
Basic facts that would inform the reader, like "how many days a year are 'code red'?" are missing. On one of the core points of contention - does corporation decide when a day is code red or do the meteorologists decide - we hear from a single meteorologist and a single corporate spokesperson who give opposite answers, but the reporter (Matthew Cappucci) apparently couldn't be bothered to call a few more Sinclair meteorologists (off the record) and figure out who was telling the truth and who was lying. Instead, readers are left to infer based on their previous biases - which, if you look at the comment section on WaPo's website - they have no problem doing.
Does this even count as journalism?
This is about as cravenly stupid as California's "red flag alert." WTF does that mean? Red flags will be falling from the sky, snarling traffic and causing mayhem?
Human stupidity is boundless.
Christ its as if someones exhumed the corpse of Stalin.