The media isn't liberal, it's just stupid.

It was a significant weather event, by the way. While we were well past it here in Loudoun County, folks living in southeastern Prince Georges County, Charles County and Calvert County were under a Tornado Watch. To put it in context, a couple of years ago, a tornado ripped through Charles County, with lots of damage and several deaths. Folks in that area are a little sensitive about weather events that might kill them.

As a side note, the area Skywarn Amateur Radio network had been active for several hours, and continued to receive reports of severe weather throughout the period of preemption (9:00-9:30 EDT). Hey, at least they didn't preempt American Idol, right? You did Tivo AI, right?

Context is oh so important.

WJLA (ABC) divides their digital channel bandwidth into two subchannels--subchannel 1 is the network feed and subchannel 2 is weather radar (except when they screw up and end up broadcasting a frame from an Appleby's commercial for over an hour... like they did during the recent broadcast of "Unbreakable". WJLA seems to screw up on their digital broadcasts quite a bit.)

It's not the weather, is it James?

A tornado watch is pretty much nothing. It just means conditions are "favorable" for a tornado. In Alabama, we called that "summer." If it's a tornado warning, then I want to know about it. But even then, a little icon at the bottom of the screen, scrolling text every once in a while, or even a very brief interruption is enough to convey the info. 25 consecutive minutes of coverage, pre-empting the programming, simply isn't warranted unless there's actual tornado activity causing significant threat to people's lives. Otherwise, it's not only annoying it's crying Wolf.

Fun fact: when stations screw with the video signal like that, the closed captioning data gets lost.

I'm sure hearing-impaired and other viewers who depend on the closed captioning were rather unhappy to miss the dialogue for half the show, especially for this.

Add to that the fact that folks are a mite sensitive, especially in Southern Maryland since the La Plata disaster in 2002, when there's the possibility of a tornado touching down. They don't happen as often around here, but they do tend to be more destructive than in other places around the country.

Sorry, the debate team fought it's way to the top of my consciousness. I'm better now, thank you.

They hide them well. You just don't go where they are. And that's probably a good thing.

How much damage could a tornado do?

Plenty of damage:

La Plata tornado, April 28, 2002
Tornadoes in Virigina, DC and Maryland on Sept 24, 2001

I figured they must have banned trailers up here; I don't think I've seen one. In much of the Deep South, there are no zoning laws, so you can literally have a trailer across the street from a mansion.

James, you have to understand, the DC area reacts to these kinds of weather events the way Alabama would react to a snowstorm.

"ABANDON YOUR CARS NOW (preferably on the Capital Beltway, I-95 or I-66)!!! THE FORECAST CALLS FOR SNOW FLURRIES IN A COUPLE OF DAYS!!!"

Interestingly, channel 8 had good coverage of the storm and I was able to see that my area of Loudoun wasn't affected. We got barely a sprinkle.

I just love watching red blobs move across the map!