News Anchor Rants at Selfish Viewers Complaining About Storm Coverage
A news anchor for KSFY in Sioux Falls, South Dakota is fed up with people complaining that severe weather coverage is preempting their precious television programs, so she launched into a mini-rant to let the whiny viewers know what she thinks of them.
Parts of the Plains and Midwest states experienced a pretty hefty severe weather outbreak on Sunday, producing copious amounts of hail and several tornadoes. Many of the storms crossed into the area around Sioux Falls, South Dakota, prompting local television stations to preempt programming to cover the weather.
After airing a segment about KSFY viewers receiving the station's warnings and getting to safety before the tornado hit, anchor Nancy Naeve let loose in about as strong of a rant as you can get away with on a local news broadcast in South Dakota:
And people just berated our station for him being on air. But I tell you what — if it was your home and your neighbors, you would feel differently, so please don't do that, that's not nice.
People whining that their precious television shows are more important than people getting tornado warnings is nothing new, and it's something that television meteorologists and their stations have had to deal with for decades. Almost every local news station has a policy in place that if there is a tornado warning in any part of their viewing area, they must stay on the air until the warning is expired or the threat diminishes.
At the beginning of April, the same thing happened during a severe weather outbreak, but over a wider area. Twitter was filled with vitriolic messages for news stations and weathermen, and broadcast meteorologists damn near tripped over themselves relaying to me all of the horror stories they have after having to break into a popular program for severe weather coverage.
It's a phenomenon that plays out time and time again. If the storm misses the whiners, the warning was the biggest inconvenience of their lives, so how dare those bastards warn other people! They've got shows to watch.
As Naeve said in the video, and as I wrote in that post back in April, most stations make shows available online within a few days.
Here are the links to every network's cache of television shows they've uploaded to their websites:
There you go. Now you can watch your shows without being interrupted.
If that's not good enough, nobody is sorry for the complainers. Other people receiving life-saving severe weather warnings is more important than seeing the final episode of Once Upon a Time.
