BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Bob Garfield. If there's one axiom that holds true for the hurricane season of 2005, it is this: When it rains, it pours.

CHARLIE GIBSON: Good evening. Now it is Rita, the latest in a long list of storms that have made this hurricane season unprecedented, cruel and relentless. [OVERLAPPING NEWSCLIPS]

BRIAN WILLIAMS: The Gulf Coast, after all, was hit three weeks ago today and tonight there is a new storm on a worrisome [OVERLAPPING AUDIO]

AARON BROWN: The hurricane is now Category Two - [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] But it is forecast to strengthen over the Gulf Coast - [OVERLAP]

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Tonight it's a Category Five. Hurricane Rita now at maximum strengthen and heading toward Texas. {OVERLAP]

CNN WEATHER REPORTER: These storms looking all too familiar unfortunately in the outlying -

BOB GARFIELD: Even as the death toll from Katrina continued to climb, TV news by Monday had turned its attention to another gathering storm, by all indications as treacherous as the one that had just ravaged the Gulf Coast. It didn't take much in the way of imagination or memory to understand the sickening menace represented by the swirling Technicolor in the corner of the screen. But with or without Katrina, those satellite images were already well-fixed in the TV lexicon. Storm coverage has a long history in broadcasting. In 1954, E.B. White observed that hurricanes were the latest discovery of radio. "To radio people," he wrote, "nature is an oddity tinged with malevolence and worthy of note only in her more violent moments." As for TV, many traced the beginnings of hurricane coverage as we know it to 1961, when a young news director in Houston by the name of Dan Rather buttoned up his rain slicker and headed out to the Galveston sea wall to greet Carla, the first of many hurricanes Dan would cover stoically from the field. But weather historian David Laskin, who we spoke to Thursday as Hurricane Rita barreled towards Galveston, pegs the beginning of modern hurricane reporting much later, 1992, to be exact.

DAVID LASKIN: I think that the current era of bombast really began with Hurricane Andrew and The Weather Channel on-camera meteorologist who nearly got blown away while standing in the winds. After that theatrical image, viewership skyrocketed and I think The Weather Channel and all the other people who report on weather went, "Wow! You know, we can really increase our ratings by having somebody almost blown away."

BOB GARFIELD: We have often on this program made sport of the clichés of hurricane coverage, the wind-blown anchors and so forth. But I guess if that trivializes the news in any way, it ain't nothin' compared to how weather [LAUGHS] was trivialized in the early days of television. Can you tell me about that?

DAVID LASKIN: Oh, yeah. The earliest days were kind of tweedy professors, you know, meteorologists smoking pipes and scratching their chins and talking about cold fronts and things, but that was very [CHUCKLES] quickly replaced by puppets, by Tex Antoine, by Carol Reed, you know, the whole weathergirl thing. There was actually a weathergirl on The Jack Paar Show who would say things like, "Virginia's going to be very warm tonight. Oh, well, poor Virginia, you know, the poor dear" - I mean, those kinds of sexual innuendos and just silliness. You know, animals, funny hats, the whole business. And I - [CHUCKLES] I think part of it was that our ability to predict weather back in those days was a lot less precise than it is now.

BOB GARFIELD: In fact, wasn't there a story with Frank Field, the weatherman from, I think, WNBC in New York?

DAVID LASKIN: Hoo! [LAUGHS]

BOB GARFIELD: Actually lost a hurricane at one point.

DAVID LASKIN: Yes. I mean, it wasn't his fault. You know, it - it was the National Hurricane Center or whatever its earliest incarnation was. In other words, some hurricane that was kind of puffing around in the Atlantic and they just kind of lost track of it. I don't think it ever hit or caused any great calamity, but it just kind of [CHUCKLES] literally fell off the radar screen.

BOB GARFIELD: Katrina, of course, is an ongoing catastrophe and God knows what's going to happen with Rita. But is it my imagination, or do I hear in the wake of hurricanes that do not cause terrible amounts of damage something that might be relief, a sense of relief in the reporting but something that also may be just a sense of disappointment?

DAVID LASKIN: Oh, absolutely. You know, I think there is always this split personality. If you're in the weather biz, you love weather, and that doesn't mean the calm, placid, benign weather. That means disaster weather. You know, we all want to see the tornado hit and blow up the farmhouse. We don't want the farmer to be there. We want them to be far away. But we want to see nature unleashed, raw and powerful.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, is this a perversity of media to kind of secretly hope for the worst or is it - [OVERTALK] -

DAVID LASKIN: [LAUGHS]

BOB GARFIELD: - a perversity of human nature or is it a perversity at all?

DAVID LASKIN: I don't think it's a perversity. I mean, I think it, to some extent, is part of human nature. I mean, I would relate it to our hunger for drama and extremes. I mean, we - we want to see violent movies. We want excitement.

BOB GARFIELD: We slow down on the highway to see the accident scenes. We - [OVERTALK]

DAVID LASKIN: Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: - go to - [OVERTALK]

DAVID LASKIN: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: - a hockey game to watch the fights. We -

DAVID LASKIN: Yes.

BOB GARFIELD: - go to races to see the car crashes.

DAVID LASKIN: Right. I mean, I think sports in its more primitive and bloody form, you know, gladiatorial combats, speaks to the same impulse. I don't - I don't want to go too far with this 'cause I - I think the new thing about the other side of the suffering, you know, I think that's the kind of the post-Katrina environment. I think it's very hard to admit to feeling a thrill when you see what happens.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, I want to bring you back then to Rita. Again, this is Thursday and it's heading for Galveston and looking at the moment like it could be a direct hit. Do you notice in the coverage that you've seen the conspicuous absence of the kind of strange desire to see how bad it can be? Are those images of the bodies floating in New Orleans somehow present, a specter in the coverage that we're seeing for Rita?

DAVID LASKIN: I think to some extent that's true. I mean, I do think that there's a kind of anticipatory horror that's crept into the reporting. I think the reason that this evacuation for Rita is so massive and people are complying so readily is because of the images that we saw after Katrina, which were not just the anchors getting blown by the wind and The Weather Channel guys with their slickers flapping. Those images of New Orleans are things that we have never seen on television or the Internet before in this country.

BOB GARFIELD: So if the "boy who cried wolf syndrome" had been effect, Katrina changed all that and we're back to square one.

DAVID LASKIN: Katrina was the wolf. But I think now we're going to think everything's going to be Katrina and any powerful storm is going to raise all sort of alarm bells. You know, never again. Never again. We can't ever let that happen again. And those are good things in terms of policy. Those are good things in terms of people's lives. Whether those are good things in terms of the media, I don't know. I mean, I think the media does tend to get into some bad habits by playing off the last disaster and playing up the last disaster. And I think it's very difficult to remain fresh and reactive when you're a reporter of whatever sort. I mean, I think you're always playing to expectations. So, yeah, I would bet that there's going to be a kind of increased level of reverence, fear and hype in terms of reporting extreme weather in the near future.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, David, thank you very much.

DAVID LASKIN: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: David Laskin is the author of several books on weather, including The Children's Blizzard.

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