Hurricane reporter on location but avoiding extremes

Reporters flying from flagpoles during hurricanes have become a cliche, says NBC’s Brian Williams.

“There’s a danger that all these images start to look alike to viewers,” Williams said via cell phone from New Orleans’ Superdome, his base of operations for Hurricane Katrina coverage.

“It’s an accepted TV news style that can fall into a pattern. I’d like to avoid it. … We’ve all done shots like that. (But) it’s still the best way to tell another human being, ‘This is what 80 miles an hour feels like.’ “

NBC News Senior Vice President Steve Capus labels wind-blown reporters as “stupid human tricks” that put the journalists in harm’s way and make viewers anxious.

“At some point, it looks kind of silly if you go overboard,” Capus says.

“You don’t need to sit in the middle of the ocean to know how powerful the tsunami is. It’s reckless to put yourself in 150-mile-per-hour winds.

“It would have been very easy to put Brian in some area that would appear to be the end of the world, and he was one gust from being blown away.

“We’re not in the business of showboating.”

Does that mean that CBS’s high-flying Dan Rather, who never met a hurricane he didn’t like, was a showboat?

“I don’t think Mr. Rather was reckless,” Capus says.

Adds Williams: “Just as they broke the mold when they made him in Texas, I think they broke the mold (for his type of hurricane coverage) when Dan retired.”

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who fought the elements Monday in Baton Rouge before driving parallel to the storm, to Jackson, Miss., used to make fun of flagpole-fliers.

“I thought, ‘Why don’t they just go indoors?’ It’s common sense,” he says.

Once Cooper began covering hurricanes, however, he did a 180.

“I believe in being on the front lines of stories, whether it’s Baghdad or Niger or hurricanes,” he says. “There’s a value to bearing witness to what hundreds of thousands of people are going through.

“I see nothing wrong with a reporter going through it with them.

“I’ve never pretended to grab onto something. The audience knows when something’s real and when it’s not.”

And when it comes to hurricanes, he adds, the fear is real: “Anyone who says they’re not afraid at the time of a hurricane is either a fool or a liar, or a little bit of both.”