Klein was more prolific than I thought. He was also cheerleading on WHAC

“We demolished the competition and demonstrated decisively our expertise in covering the news that matters most. We were thorough, knowledgeable, informative, aggressive, and extremely compelling to watch. Could not have asked for a more outstanding performance by our team on air and behind the scenes.”

This is better prose from Klein. No outright fight picking like with the TVNewser quip. But still lacking in proper humility. You didn’t demolish the competition. But you were good. Why not stick to that? Why sink to the playground taunting…?

TVNewser had a brief conversation today with CNN’s Jonathan Klein and the subject of FOX News’ hurricane coverage came up…

“They’re just so far outclassed in an event like this,” he said, and news events like Hurricane Dennis demonstrate “vividly that they’re not a news organization. It is like night and day…They’re just not built to cover important news.”

There is some truth to this but also quite a lot of spin. Yes, FOX had some troubles today. A lot of satellite disruptions occurred on FOX. And it is true that FOX didn’t have the number of reporters in the field that CNN had and it didn’t have the weather technology that MSNBC had (neither did CNN though). In ICN’s opinion, today was not FOX’s best effort.

But “They’re just not built to cover important news.”?????
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TVNewser has an exclusive on the behind the scenes of CNN’s Hurricane One mobile satellite unit…

One of the original Hummers is parked in the lobby of the CNN Center in Atlanta, and it occurred to someone — “I believe Nancy Lane, who’s our news director, and her husband, who is an engineer/technician,” Klein said — that the technology could be used along the Gulf Coast:

“They said hey, covering a hurricane is very much like covering a battlefield — fast-changing conditions, extreme danger, difficulty in getting specifically to where the story is — why don’t we use the same tools to cover the hurricane that we did in Iraq?”

The question I have, which didn’t occur to me until I read this, is what happened to MSNBC’s Bloom Mobile; the NTSC video quality mobile satellite truck nicknamed after the late David Bloom that was used so effectively in the Iraq war and which smokes any video phone technology like that used by Hurricane One? The last time I saw it in action was a couple of years ago in a lackluster hurricane which didn’t have much going on compared to this one. So why wasn’t it used today?

MSNBC was using a new weather technology today on its Hurricane Dennis coverage. It’s called ESP: Live and the product is so new there isn’t anything on it listed in the Products page of the Weather Central website. I did locate a PDF File that announced the product at NAB 2005.

ESP: Live features a radical new approach to storm and weather coverage tools. ESP: Live allows on-air talent to report on breaking weather while keeping the graphics and radar displays understandable for the viewers. In addition, the radar and storm track displays can now be interactively displayed with talent on-screen, improving the clarity of the presentation while providing full control of the presentation.

What this meant today was that Weather Central meteorologist Bill Boss was able to do some amazing things with the radar image. Here’s an example of what he called “a CAT scan of the storm”….
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Hurricane Dennis is scheduled to make landfall around 4 pm. Both CNN and MSNBC had specials scheduled for 8 pm. CNN was running a CNN Presents special on Counterterroism with David Ensor and MSNBC was scheduled to kick off its “Return To Flight” Shuttle coverage with Chris Jansing live from Florida. Has the hurricane now put those shows in jeapordy? On MSNBC there has been lots of advertising during their Live News broadcasts of the Shuttle Launch scheduled for Wednesday but zero mention of tonight’s special, which is not normal MSNBC behavior.

UPDATE: TVNewser reports that MSNBC’s Jansing special has been put off until Tuesday night. CNN’s special has been pre-empted as well according to their schedule on the CNN.com site.

A tipster wrote in that CNN got confused over what Hurricane Dennis footage to air last night and ended up running a report from an NBC affiliate with an NBC employee…

I’m sitting here doing a little work with CNN’s live storm coverage on in the background. I heard them pitch to “WPMI’s Jay Gray” (at 1:51am ET)
I thought… hmm… that’s the name of an NBC NewsChannel reporter (the affiliate service). I figured it was a coincidence. It’s not. I TiVoed back the package… it’s NBC’s Jay Gray all right. WPMI is a Clear Channel station, and an NBC affil. They also use the CNN Newsource service, and likely uplinked their late news to CNN (the PKG ran with WPMI supers).

Some CNN producer probably saw the PKG on ‘PMI’s air, and assumed it was safe for use (since Gray was live in Alabama). It wasn’t — that’s a HUGE copyright violation… in no way shape or form does CNN have access to NBC material.

The script for the Jay Gray piece is here and clearly shows that Gray was working for NBC at the time his spot aired on CNN….