Unrestrained rant about the weatherman(woman)

Consider this a leftover thought from Saturday...
...but what the hell is our fascination with local weather on TV news? Seriously, how many of the stations called Saturday's early morning snow ahead of time? Yep, none. That was a hell of a surprise when I went out for my morning run.

What really bothers me is that we get all this weather coverage (usually at least 2-3 segments, spanning 6-7 minutes) because viewer surveys say that people want to see as much weather as possible. Even channel 5's latest evening news advertisement has Sandra Ali saying '...you told us you wanted more weather coverage, so we're giving it to you'.

This would be all fine and dandy, if it weren't for the fact that they got the forecast wrong at least 1/3 of the time. Of course, this is the same population that swallows Bush's lies on a daily basis and still votes for him, so maybe they like getting false information. Why the hell did they purchase all of these Doppler 8000000000 systems if they can't get much more accurate than a simple coin flip.

At it's expense, the rest of the newscast gets pared down to almost nothing (and we could argue about the merits of the remainder of the cast, but that's another discussion). There's no sort of reporting going on, and local interest stories get the shaft. Besides, have you seen a decent local sports report in the last 15 years? Most stations don't even bother with one anymore. Hell, I'd rather watch John Matarese or Howard Ain do one of their smug consumer alert segments.

This is going to take some more research, but I think this rant is going to spawn a weather watch project of some sort to figure out how close the stations actually get to the real weather. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go outside, but first I'm going to get the Zack Morris special forecast; I'm going to stick my head out the window and see what it feels like.