Hurricane Irene has come and gone.  Gratefully, she didn’t turn out to be the lady from hell as reported.  In no way am I trying to minimize the damage and trouble that she did cause some people.  I mourn for the people that died, the homes that were ruined, the floods that probably cost us millions as a nation.

I’m only going to address one distressing aspect of it all in this post.  That is the most disappointing trend in of dishonesty in the reporting of the news.

Saturday night, the evening before Irene was to arrive here in NYC, I battened down the hatches of my apartment, protected the windows, filled the bathtubs, stocked in the correct food and water for the long haul and plastic-wrapped much of my equipment in my studio just in case.  The Missus was away in Boston.

I went to bed feeling prayerful and secure about 2:00 in the morning and went immediately asleep in what was now a strong rainstorm.  I awoke about 5:00 AM, the time we were told that Irene was to begin arriving and curiosity got the better of me.  Hearing no gale force winds, in fact hearing no winds at all, I got up and pealed back one of my windows and looked out into the dawning day.

It was raining.  That was about it.  I immediately figured that Irene got hung up in Philadelphia and was not as prompt as was foretold.  I started to go back to bed.  Then I decided to double-check the news on the tube.

I surfed 5 different channels for the next hour fascinated by the difference between what was going on outside my window and what was going on there on my TV screen.  They couldn’t have been talking about my city, my streets, my world – but they were.

Trouble was they just weren’t telling the truth.  Instead I watched a handful of wet newscasters in raincoats standing out in the rain trying to trump up the drama of a storm that was little more than a rainstorm at that point.  I got the eerie feeling that most of these people were somehow trying desperately to be our heroes and clearly exaggerating the conditions to somehow hold our morbid attention, scare us into staying at home, and possibly even hold each of us to their own particular channel to better their ratings.

It’s true: trees fell, leaves fluttered in the breeze, streets were wet, waves were probably bigger than normal, but the videos just did not match the incendiary language and alarming energies of the various newscasters having their moment in the sun (or should I say, “…having their moment in the clouds.”)

The storm or hurricane or tropical storm (whatever it was) ceased to be the issue for me.  The real issue here was the reporting of the truth.  This constant trying to jack up the drama of what was clearly a hurricane lover’s disappointment became laughable to me as newscaster after newscaster across all 5 networks over-acted and misreported the realities of the moment.

One wet man actually said somewhat hysterically, “We’re seeing every wave here get bigger than the one before!  Soon they’ll be 20 feet!”  The waves behind him in the sea looked to me to be 3 footers at best.  One wet woman standing in the NY street perfectly still said, “I’m having trouble standing in this wind” while the leaves of a tree waved gently behind her and the rain fell straight around her – no sheets, no buckets.

I could go on and on.  As I said, I watched all this nonsense (a most appropriate word) for the next hour, got bored with the hyped up drama, checked out my window once more to make sure something hadn’t transpired while I wasn’t watching, (it was actually calmer now outside than before as the reporters were now dire in their warnings that Irene had, in fact, now officially arrived in our fair town) and, seeing little but a rainstorm outside, went back to bed.

I slept peacefully for the next six hours, never hearing a breeze outside my window, never once being jarred from my rest by some untoward happenstance.  I awoke to a partly sunny day and dry streets.  I cannot imagine the disappointment of our heroic newscasters as their moments in the sun turned out to be just that – moments in the sun.

Oh Walter Cronkite, where are you now that we need you?  Where is the simple truth of yesteryear?  I don’t want to watch Fox for the Republican viewpoint or twist on events and I don’t want to watch CNN for the Democratic slant.  I just want to watch some simple good old-fashioned truthful news reporting.  “Just the facts, Mam, just the facts” as Sergeant Friday used to say.  I’ve lost track of where to turn for the truth.  I don’t want a newscaster’s personal point of view on an issue.  I don’t care what they think.  Just tell me what happened.  They actually used to do this on television.  One actually had the feeling that the news was unbiased.

Today, I get the feeling that it’s really more about creating sensationalism for the ratings than telling the truth.  I’m not saying anything here that you all probably don’t already know.  We’ve all seen the change.  I’m here to tell you I don’t like it.  It’s simply dishonest.

What I witnessed during the events of Irene the other morning was a silly aggrandizement of self-importance perpetuating an atmosphere of panic at a time when people needed to be reassured that, if they simply stayed home and took care of business, they could go back to bed and get a good night’s sleep.

I did anyway because I’ve learned that the news is often no longer the truth.

It’s a sad state of affairs.