Daily Show host Jon Stewart frequently lampooned American news coverage for the lazy and hyperbolic nature of their coverage. Recent coverage of the “Bomb Cyclone” hitting the city of Boston demonstrates everything that Stewart loved to lampoon. While there is no question that a major weather event like a bomb cyclone deserves some coverage, local and national news is saturated with news of the blizzard, and several  news outlets in the Boston area are posting continuous coverage of the storm,, including live-streaming coverage of the storm from NBC10-Boston,

Most of the coverage of the storm consists of the typically stupid shots of guys in heavy winter gear trying to figure out a hundred different ways to say “Yep, there’s a lot of snow out here,” and sharing images of cars creeping along on snow-covered roads, snowplows sending up plumes of slush and snow as they pass by the camera, and front-end loaders piling up giant mountains of snow at the edges of commercial parking lots.

This is part of an on-going pattern in American media. The same local media outlets that regularly insist they just don’t have the staff or resources to get into the details of local issues such as school board meetings, city zoning policies or local government spending, suddenly have unlimited resources to provide highly repetitive, continuous coverage of weather events.

Does a major storm deserve some news coverage? Absolutely it does. Should local news outlets be providing updates for people in their viewing area? Absolutely they should. But it’s a matter of balance, and right now, local media outlets across the US are treating their viewers like children, by ignoring coverage of local government issues that really matter, and then pulling out all the stops to produce simplistic and highly repetitive continuous coverage of things like weather events.