It's a slow news period in late August, so who hasn't started thinking ahead to the second anniversary of Katrina? (We know that Time and Time Inc. have, getting in there right at the beginning of the month). Next week will be a busy one for retrospectives, hard looks at FEMA, heckuva job jokes, and paying attention to New Orleans, and maybe Mississippi if they're lucky (this does not necessarily include Bush, though who knows, perhaps Dan Bartlett will make him another handy DVD for some casual viewing). But in the meantime, Hurricane Dean makes for a creepy commemoration, to be sure, as 
once again the nets and cablers have their correspondents decked out in slickers and braving high winds on the coast of Mexico to cover the story. Though it started out looking grim this morning as Dean bore down as a Category 5 hurricane (see above screengrab), fortunately by landfall the storm had weakened to a Cat 3 (see NBC's Mike Boettcher, right). The tone on "Morning Joe" (where early birds get their news, and on occasion ETP answers to that description) was reminiscent of the pre-Katrina tone of the storm coverage: Recall Wonkette's "Weather Porn" post; the video of a hapless (and pre-weeping) Anderson Cooper being batted about by wind and rain, and then (with John Zarella) being chased down by a flying Ramada sign; the hoopla over CNN's flashy fortified truck, "Hurricane One," which was KO'd during Katrina; and my own pre-Katrina liveblog, starting off with jokes about seeing Anderson Cooper wet and dripping, and slowly changing tone as the gravity of the situation became apparent (that shocking NOAA advisory had yet to reach wide circulation, and had yet to come into horrific effect). This morning, the tone on "Morning Joe" reminded me of that time — slightly jovial (as is his wont), with light kidding with Boettcher, subsiding into gravity when the the death toll was discussed (12 at that point). No real point to make here, other than to note the fine line between exciting, in-the-whirl-of-the-action news and, well, entertainment; the whole paradigm of hurricane reporting shifted on itself after Katrina, and two years later lighter moments can't be recalled without the shadow of what that was.
A separate point: The networks are really using their citizen journalists here, particularly CNN, who have forged ahead with their iReports and taken the lead on it in terms of branding and ubiquity; the network has succeeded in making the term "i-Reporter" sound genuinely official, even to the extent that it's just some dude with a cameraphone. Fox, too, is pushing their (originally-named) U-Reports (focusing, too, on Hurricane Erin fallout in the midwest); MSNBC has their FirstPerson site, but that doesn't seem to have taken hold in the same way.
This post is a good example of something that started off one way and turned out another — it was meant to be a quick one-off post about how the networks are fighting Hurricane Dean over there so we only have to deal with rain over here, complete with a rain-inspired playlist because, hey, it's freaking August. And because that part is more fun, I did it first. So, at the risk of being a complete hypocrite and trivializing everything I just wrote, I'm still going to include my playlist because, hey, it's a rainy day in August and you probably won't find Led Zeppelin and Les Miz on the same playlist anytime soon. Also, Irma Thomas rules. In the meantime, for more on the Hurricane Dean coverage, TVNewser is on the case.
Related in Rainy-Day Audio:
- The Rain Song - Led Zeppelin
- November Rain - Guns n' Roses
- London Rain - Heather Nova
- Purple Rain - Prince
- Red Rain - Peter Gabriel
- Red Rain - The White Stripes
- Fire and Rain - James Taylor
- A Little Fall of Rain - Les Misérables
- Have You Ever Seen The Rain? - Creedence Clearwater Revival
- Alternatively, Who'll Stop It? - Creedence Clearwater Revival
- It's Raining - Irma Thomas
- It's Raining Again - Supertramp
- Here Comes The Rain Again - The Eurythmics
- A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall - Bob Dylan
- Rain Down On Me - Blue Rodeo
- Walkin' In The Rain - Jay and the Americans
- Hold Back the Rain - Duran Duran
- I Think It's Gonna Rain Today - Neil Diamond
- Love , Reign O'er Me - The Who (counts for pun purposes AND for the rain-sounds in background)