Anchor Confessions.

This is an article about television coverage of hurricanes and of news in general. The power of pictures and the ability to marry them with compelling narrative can give TV a considerable advantage over its competitors. Keep in mind, say those who argue Cronkite's point is still valid today, that if you take a transcript of every word uttered on a TV newscast and print it on the front page of a major daily, it might not fill that space, depending of course on the size of that page one picture. In the days before it hit, the highways heading out of Florida were jammed with residents on the run, while the highways heading into Florida must have looked like a racetrack for TV satellite trucks. Much of the eventual coverage, especially from local stations, was professionally done--after all, for millions of people in the storm area, TV was the place to turn for up-to-the-minute developments, not the morning paper with its regurgitation of what happened yesterday. Watching one U.S. network the other day, a hurricane-whipped reporter was standing on an almost 45-degree angle, yelling about how careless some Floridians were to be out in such bad weather.