In the Bleak Midwinter

People are entitled to complain about bias in the media, but I’m largely indifferent to the problem. This is not because “liberal bias” doesn’t exist—I’ve been a journalist for 40 years and lifelong witness—but because it is so pervasive, and so impervious to challenge, that it is hardly worth mentioning. One might just as usefully complain about the weather. 

David Clark

Or, as I prefer, about weathermen/women. I am speaking here of the meteorologists on the local news, the smiling, pivoting, late-evening forecasters who point at places on transparent maps, and keep us in a high-pressure state of anxiety about low-pressure systems coming in from the Great Lakes. I mean, I enjoy the geography lessons—Mobile is on the Gulf, Long Island is the storm-system gateway to New England—but I frankly resent their warm-weather bias. Moreover, it is just as widespread, and nearly as infuriating to me, as the other kind of bias.

It takes several forms. Weather-men automatically assume that their viewers welcome spring-like weather, or unseasonably high temperatures, or spend much of the year impatiently awaiting beach weekends. Eternal sunshine is an occasion for thanksgiving, cold and clouds for mourning. Snow is a horrific imposition. 

I am a suburban commuter, and so I have appropriately mixed feelings about snow. But beyond that I am almost wholly alienated from the weathermen’s worldview. I am disappointed, not delighted, when record-breaking warm temperatures are recorded in January. I have no interest in acknowledging hot weather by motoring, lemming-like, to the Atlantic coastline, there to bake in the sun and drink Orange Julius. I am much more excited by the prospect of breaking my Chesterfield coat out of mothballs than my Bermuda shorts. I would rather don a tweed suit than a bathing suit.