Dear TV News, You suck!

I was busy all day and didn't have a chance to see any news on what was going on with Hurricane Katrina. When I got home, I turned on the TV and spent the last hour flipping between the major news networks to see the aftermath. I got a sense that it was thought there was pretty significant damage, but no one was really saying anything for sure. It seemed as though they hadn't been around the area much and didn't have a real sense of what everything was like. There were reporters in some locations, reporting by phone usually - no video or pictures, who did report heavy damage, although mostly in the form of extreme flooding. Mostly though there were the main anchors such as Anderson Copper and Shepard Smith getting their face time in front of the cameras either live or recordings from earlier in the day when the were in the thick of things.

Then, I turned on the internet and flipped between a few webpages. First was cnn then Yahoo news. When I got to Yahoo news, I immediately went to the photo section and started browsing pictures of the aftermath. In three minutes I had so much more information about the state of things. I knew what the roof of SuperDome looked like. I saw the Hyatt Hotel which had all it's windows blown out (miraculously, it appears most of the curtains survived). I saw the looks on people's faces, cars turned over, power lines leaning almost to the ground, an area submerged in what appeared to be about 6 feet of water, what appeared to be an oil rig stuck under a suspension bridge (if not an oil rig, some sort of giant platform. And so on...and so on.

TV News - you suck. You suck so bad. The internet rules!