The “storm of the century” that just unloaded two feet of snow on the middle Atlantic states proved conclusively just how useless modern news media are. First bone of contention: “Storm of the Century”? The century is only three years old and they’ve been three mild years; even if we’d had a lousy ten inches of snow it could technically have been the storm of the century to date.

The newspapers seem to have been out in their Happy Places, because their reporting of the storm was random and ineffectual. Neither the Baltimore Sun nor the Washington Post managed to completely convey things that people needed to know — i.e., snow emergency routes and what to do if your car is trapped on one, plowing schedules, what to do with your trash, which institutions will be closed. The Sun roundly ignored the near destruction of one of the city’s major landmarks — the roof collapse of the gigantic old B&O Roundhouse garnered precisely one article — but six days later gave several column inches to the collapse of a Toys “R” Us in Lanham. This paper’s priorities are, to be blunt, screwed.

Radio has always been one of my favorite technologies. Even in the face of HDTV and fiber optics, the idea that you can somehow pull sound out of thin air seems amazing. I still get a charge out of firing up the ancient floor-model radio and discovering that I’m able to pull in a station from Fargo, or someplace similarly exotic. The actual content of radio broadcasting doesn’t offer the same excitement. It doesn’t even offer usefulness. During the actual storm, most of the local stations broadcast the same list of school closings over and over, interspersed with one of their hapless reporters telling the audience via remote that he was standing on Eastern Avenue (or Liberty Heights, or Gilmor street) and that yes, indeed, it was snowing. Good thing, too; we’d never have figured that out without help from WCBM. Once the storm was over and the digging-out process under way, you’d have hoped the radio stations would provide some information, but obviously the need for testosterone-addled jock doofs was higher, and it was right back to sports talk and widespread fear of “tax-and-spend Liberals.” This is pretty much par for the course on Baltimore radio. Even when we’re not buried in snow the radio is worthless, providing blips of news and weather — never any traffic information — only when there’s a lull in calls from unemployed men with nothing better to do than calculating batting averages and relaying said information to the radio station, which then broadcasts it to other men with nothing better to do than calculating batting averages.

Because the TV is the most omnipresent news drone these days, it’s also the most annoying. The radio just tells you that it’s snowing; the TV insists upon showing you. Again, no pertinent information that could possibly benefit the viewer; the stations simply send the low man on their totem pole out into the blizzard to show you that it’s snowing. Over and over, all day long.

Snowstorms must be a boon for the media in this part of the country. They know that everyone will be panicking and will turn on the TV or radio, and will cross ten-foot drifts for a late edition paper. There’s no actual work required on their part; they just have to keep telling people that it’s snowing. I think that people are really only listening for four words, exciting or ominous depending on age: “Baltimore City Schools: Closed.”