AFAICT there's no universally agreed upon meteorological definition for "code red day." Rather, this is just something Sinclair made up for "risk of severe weather." A "code red" is also used to refer to air quality[1]. And fire risk[2]. There's also the CodeRED alert system[3].
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.
The problem is that most of the people who are watching don't know that "code red" has no real meaning, and they may decide what action to take based on what the TV station says. Those actions could end up being costly and unnecessary.
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.
Since the term has no real meaning, maybe desensitizing people to it by overusing it is the best outcome.
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.
The problem is that people who've gotten desensitized to fake Red Alerts, are also going to be skeptical when the National Weather Service issues real alerts, because most people can't tell the difference. Do you know what specific terms the weather service uses for real alerts? I sure don't.
As it happens, I do. NWS alerts are either "watch" or "warning." I have a radio for alerts. The weather alerts are by type (flooding, thunderstorm, tornado) and severity (watch or warning). I've disabled everything but tornado warning (not watch) on my radio. That means a tornado has been spotted and I want it to wake me up so I can get my family into the basement.
That's just you though. And me. Probably most HNers too. But our parents or friends? For many of them, it's all the same, some folks in telly communicating warnings they divined via arcane magic and satellites.
This type of ad hominem just sets back your case, no matter how much facts may be on your side. Stick to facts and leave the insulting stereotypes at home.
What if receiving political slurs is ones lived reality? I’ve been called a silly (stupid/fucking/etc) liberal in response to my views on climate change. The discussion was on topic, perhaps not written in APA per APA style guide but we can judge the content just fine without someone pretending to be a schoolmaster tut tutting at a naughty child.
Thank you. I have in fact erexperienced this political slur, delivered in this accent, in the context of a very similar argument, with regularity.
Regardless of the intended outcome, this will be the actual outcome for at least ~1/3 of viewers, although given the history of Sinclair broadcast group I don't think it is a very large leap at all to speculate about it also being the intent.
I actually see a parallel between this and the Boeing Max issue.
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.
I guess I'm not super concerned, because I stopped watching TV news a long long time ago. In general they do everything they can to spread fear, and this is just an extension of that.
Does it worry you that this kind of fear-mongering might be bad for society even if it doesn't impact you personally? You might not watch the local news, but many other people do.
It's just corporate media who no longer cares about informing the public in seek of profits. It guarantees a watcher all day to consume ads, on edge about extreme events to stay tuned and consume ads, while also normalizing severity. These things are already put out on TV, Radio, and over many SAME alerts by NWS in the event that there is a real emergency. There is also the easy to read convective outlook.
It's not really about spreading fear, per se, it's marketing. Stations want their weather team portrayed as the most accurate and most dependable with the most cutting edge 3D no 4D no HYPERCUBIC storm tracking technology.
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.
This article is a study in the death of old news. It leads the reader towards a simple clickbaity conclusion "Sinclair bad, meteorologists good" but it doesn't come close to providing enough information to the reader or show any sign of independent investigation.
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.
I see this going in the direction of hiring models to deliver a fully-scripted weather report full of ads and politics and sex appeal with almost zero weather-related content.
"Code red?" That doesn't even mean anything! Where is the word "weather" in that? Or "severe?" Or whatever it is that they're pretending to convey?
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?
“Red flag” actual has a legal meaning in California. Several places have restrictions that come into effect on Red Flag fire days, including no parking areas where vehicles can be preemptively towed because they may impede the fire trucks.
It's a Sinclair news thing. If you don't watch your local Fox affiliate for your local news, you'd never see it, regardless of what part of the country you're in.
So, why are we not closing stations for scheduled code red days on normal weather? They are lying to the public, but it doesn't seem there are any consequences for them, only for the employees that object to the lying.
The meteorologist made some very valid points, though. The Sinclair alert system isn’t clear and well-designed, unlike the long-standing NWS alert system.
Indirectly related, but it’s worth reading up on some of the political battles being fought in the US meteorological world at the moment.
An Accuweather executive, Barry Myers, was nominated to head the NOAA, which he’s spent years lobbying against to cut off public access to government weather data[0]. This story was featured in Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Fifth Risk, which documented instances where private companies are trying to block public access to various types of government data.
Private interests are materially altering reporting systems that have worked for years, and many professional meteorologists are becoming more concerned about this influence.
Sinclair media owns most local TV stations in the US and uses them to shape public discourse in less-than-ethical ways. I think when local news has gotten as consolidated as it is, it ought to have some kind of obligation to the public, and shouldn't be able to hide behind "it's a private company" to justify bad behavior.
Yes, this weather-report manipulation is the tip of the iceberg.
The station managers get frequent directives from corporate management to hype more-or-less fake stories, and suppress other (real) stories, largely for political purposes.
Before the FCC rescinded its balanced-reporting rules this sort of foolishness was contained, at the cost of sometimes requiring airing fringe lunacy. Now fringe lunacy is often the whole story.
>Crain was not seen delivering the weather on air Thursday morning, and his bio has since been removed from the company site. Torossian declined to discuss Crain’s employment status Friday afternoon, stating that “our policy is to not comment on individual personnel matters.”
Christ its as if someones exhumed the corpse of Stalin.
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-...
3. https://www.onsolve.com/solutions/products/codered/