Weather Channel aired reruns during Ky. tornado outbreak

Programming decision during weather disaster criticized by some expecting wall-to-wall coverage

Late Friday night, as a series of deadly tornadoes swept over western Kentucky, the Weather Channel aired reruns.

Though the National Weather Service continued to issue reports of tornadoes into early morning, from midnight until 6 a.m., the Weather Channel ran old episodes of docuseries on surviving extreme weather, issuing one-minute storm updates just once every 30 minutes, Mediaite reported.

Around 2 a.m. Eastern time, a tornado hit Bowling Green, Ky., killing 15 people. The Weather Channel was running an old episode of Could You Survive? with Creek Stewart.

“I was stunned,” said Carey Hoffman, a resident of Cincinnati, who described watching the storm advance toward southern Ohio while the Weather Channel showed reruns. “At 11 o’clock on Friday night, they were in crisis mode. At midnight, they went dark.”

Overnight, the Weather Channel did provide local alerts from the National Weather Service via a crawl at the bottom of the screen. And, in addition to the one-minute updates on their national feed, they also provided more than a dozen three- to five-minute local weather reports for audiences in the threat area.

The Friday storm, which cut a 250-mile path from Arkansas to Kentucky, killed at least 90 people, making it the deadliest tornado outbreak in a decade. The death toll was worse made higher by the fact the storm struck at night.

Because it is harder to spot a tornado after dark, and most people are asleep in their homes, nighttime tornadoes are more than twice as likely to kill as daytime tornadoes. In that environment, TV broadcasts have a crucial role to play in warning the public about tornadoes, said Anita Atwell Seate, a

University of Maryland social scientist specializing in risk communication.

“TV broadcasters provide a direct link from the National Weather Service, where the warnings are coming from, to the public,” she said. “If community members had preexisting relationships with the Weather Channel — meaning this is their go-to source for news — then that’s a segment of the population that potentially isn’t getting the information they need.”

On Twitter, meteorologists took note of the Weather Channel’s gap in tornado coverage.

AccuWeather also paused its continuous live coverage overnight. But in contrast with the Weather Channel, which showed entertainment programming, AccuWeather ran a mix of prerecorded weather news stories that were updated throughout the night, interspersed with updates on the tornado outbreak as well as weather forecasts.

Fox Weather maintained continuous live coverage of the storm overnight on its streaming service from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Central time.

The Weather Channel’s decision to show reruns during an ongoing weather disaster stands at odds with its record of providing wall-to-wall coverage of extreme weather events, a strategy that earned it large numbers of viewers around previous storms, such as Hurricane Ida.