I take great pride in having worked at WFAA-TV, one of the great television stations in this country over the past few decades. During much of my time there I covered severe weather in real-time online and on-air.
So when a major storm began moving through the Dallas-Fort Worth area Tuesday night the first place I turned (even though we were watching another station) was Channel 8. Generally speaking, they do exceptional severe weather coverage. Chief Meteorologist Pete Delkus is usually the first weather anchor on with important weather information and the last to end coverage.
What happened Tuesday was embarrassing. Instead of going wall-to-wall, the television term for continuous coverage, with the severe weather the station instead decided to mostly just show the finale of Dancing with the Stars, one of the most popular shows on television.
But a lot of things are more important than the dancing ability of Kristie Alley and Hines Ward.
During the height of the storm around 8:30 p.m. when there were tornado warnings, meaning the current conditions were capable of producing a tornado, and there were several reports of rotation all of the local television stations, including CW33, were in continuous coverage except WFAA, the former ratings leader in the market. Instead, WFAA did occasional cut-ins or did a split screen with DWTS.
The choice was provide potentially life-saving information to people or show a meaningless dancing competition.
WFAA made the wrong decision.
