CNN's Nguyen shines in coverage of Ike
Kudos to CNN for its Saturday morning coverage of Hurricane Ike.
I was sitting here with CNN on in background as I went through 150 comments from my post last night on Charles Gibson and Sarah Palin’s third and last sitdown. But it didn’t take long for me to stop with the comments to admire the work of on-scene anchor Betty Nguyen and a strong team of CNN reporters including Rob Marciano in Galveston and Sean Callebs in Houston.
Nguyen was in downtown Houston as morning broke and the night’s damage to high-rise windows, street signs and trees could be seen. She was totally focused in bringing the scene to viewers as she walked from site to site skillfully reporting the damage.
Here's a real multi-media moment: As I was watching Nguyen, I heard a National Public Radio (NPR) report coming from a radio in another room. The correspondent made it sound as if the weather was too intense to risk going outside. But there was Nguyen live on my TV screen – and she was standing just down the street from that hotel.
When CNN does its own journalistic flooding of the zone this way, there are too many producers, anchors and correspondents to mention. But T. J. Holmes, Nguyen’s regular weekend co-anchor, also did a nice job back in the studio.
Some of my print colleague like to mock TV news reporters when they are shown in ponchos and baseball hats standing in hurricane winds. I think we should salute them when they do well -– particularly when an air-brushed anchor (and let me acknowledge that I welcome the airbrush myself when I do talk shows in HD) gets out in the field and shows that she or he has the kind of grit, poise and focus that Nguyen did Saturday morning.
(AP Photo of the damage in Galveston, Texas, by Matt Slocum)
