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The day after

You could tell the White Sox and Astros fans at the office today from the bags under their eyes.

We are mulling over beginning the broadcast tonight with some traces of deja vu: thousands of Americans stranded (in Mexico) and others in increasingly desperate need of basic assistance (in Florida), all part of this horrible season of natural disasters.

Washington continues to carefully inhale and exhale... as the jittery wait continues until we hear something from the Grand Jury. There are a slew of rumors, tons of speculation. Even today's news that there would be "no announcements today" was obliquely sourced... nothing on the record. We believe the targets know who they are, but if so they're not talking. We'll update the situation tonight, along with the status of the Harriet Miers nomination.

We'll also check in on New Orleans tonight, with Kevin Tibbles reporting on the bleak job situation. There's also good news to report tonight on breast cancer survival rates.

To the mailbag...

I've figured out there's a pattern to my e-mail: those of you who write to this address in response to the blog tend to write e-mails that are kind in nature. Those I receive through Nightly News, from the nationwide viewer pool, often skew toward the very critical. We'll post one a little later this afternoon. I'll withhold his name and town because I'm a nice guy (contrary to his assessment of my work and character). I guess the above trend speaks to the pro-Nightly News disposition among our highly intelligent blog readers.

Those of you who wrote me yesterday claiming we misused the term "milestone" in our reporting of the American military death toll of 2,000 in Iraq (several people wrote to say "milestone" is another word for "a target or goal," indicating it had a hopeful connotation) were wrong according to the Webster's next to my computer. It defines a milestone as a "significant point in development."

A lot of you didn't like our reporting on the number of casualties in Iraq, which I addressed in yesterday's posting. A lot of viewers also didn't like the fact that we devoted air time to Al Roker's adventures in Wilma a few days ago (watch the video here). More on that general topic below.

I promised to address two questions today. First, one of you wrote asking about the training we receive when covering war zones. There are several answers here. Our embedded folks who covered the Iraq war went through an actual U.S. military training program. As I went there "unilaterally" (not attached to any specific unit), with no guarantee that I would make it from Kuwait into Iraq, I received no training and then promptly made it into Iraq, twice. There are also cases like Richard Engel's. He's been at this for so long (even though he's not far past the 30 mark), he's just completely comfortable around danger and live fire. The advice you get is often contradictory: conventional wisdom (and military trainers) would tell you: when in doubt, stay down. Yet when I asked the wife of a heavily-decorated, thrice-wounded, Vietnam-era, 4-star general why she thought her husband had survived all that he did, she answered simply, "because he never ducked, and always walked with his head held high." I haven't tried the latter.

Josh in Connecticut wrote and asked: In what way did you expect hurricane coverage to change (post-Katrina)? And why hasn't it?

This is tricky, in that if I felt I could, I would vow never again to stand outside in a storm for the sake of showing what it's like to stand outside in a storm. But given the vagaries of changing events and storm coverage, one can never say never. The truth is that at the height of Katrina, while I was inside the Superdome watching sections of the roof get torn off, I was interviewed by telephone by TV critic Gail Shister of the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was writing a column (which I'm assuming ran with my quotes) about what a cliche hurricane coverage had become: the rain, the wind, the jackets (some logos larger than others), the correspondents ending up on their keisters... and the fact that it continues in this era of the Daily Show, as if to knowingly provide content to those who "re-purpose" it for a comedy show, and with good reason. It's funny to watch. Is that "covering" a storm? The truth is, at the height of a good (or, in lay terms outside of our twisted trade, a "bad") hurricane, we're out of business anyway. We can't broadcast live from a satellite dish after the winds hit a certain speed, and cannot go outside to shoot tape. But we're great at aftermath.

When Weather Channel meteorologist Mike Seidel and I left our feet and took an unscheduled flight over portions of Virginia Beach while covering a hurricane, the clip was replayed 10,000 times. I still come across it on "best-of" (or is it "worst-of"?) compilations of reporters interacting with wind. Of course it is hardly the kind of work any of us want to be remembered for, but it often comes with the territory in television journalism, especially for those at the local level and on cable news. I thought that after Katrina... after we saw what consequences these storms can have... after we saw how vulnerable we were... after we watched Americans starve and die before our eyes and watched bodies floating through the nation's 25th largest city... things would change. They have not. The benchmark standard, based on experiencing Wilma as a viewer and not a participant, remains: jacketed correspondents getting pelted by wind, rain and sand. Thus my lament.

To the teenage girls in Wichita (read the comments at the end of this post) and Jennifer in Nagoya, Japan: it's great to receive comments like yours. I devote a lot of time and attention to this blog, we're proud of it and of what we do, and I'm happy you're watching and reading.

Back to the broadcast: still, at this hour, as it is most evenings...a work in progress. We hope you'll join us.

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