It might just be me, but I've found local TV news coverage of the LA fires to be mostly terrible. It's low on information and high on disaster porn/drama, and a fair bit of it has been wildly misleading. They cannot shake their bog standard reporting templates for this critical event.

- On-scene reporters asking people who are literally running around putting out spot fires at their house if they could stop for an interview.
- Picking through the ashes of houses and putting burnt photo albums and other destroyed personal items on camera.
- Certain helicopter reporters yelling mostly low information nonsense for half an hour.
- Obviously wholly unqualified opining on emergency response, and evacuations that has caused massive confusion (no, NBC4, all of LA isn't under a boil-water alert from the DWP).

There's an opportunity here for local TV news to be a useful asset for the community, and they're all too frequently blowing it.

#lafires #PalisadesFire #EatonFire

@stacey_campbell What LA news needs to do is to hire competent fire analysts to do a play by play. What they do, instead, is they have people who don't know anything about wildfires yammering. I turn off the volume, it's useless info.

I like to think of it as using your Lifestyle/Fashion reporter to call an NFL game. Would you do that? NO! That's what they are doing all the time.

@ai6yr @stacey_campbell
"As I understand it, Keith, water extinguishes fire. And I'm seeing a lot of fire here. So a question I have is, why aren't they putting more water on the fire? Let's go live to Brittany, who is standing in an intersection with a LOT of flashing lights behind her....."

@ColesStreetPothole @ai6yr @stacey_campbell

Actually smothering the fire, i.e. citting off its O2 w the chemical powders that also contain some energy absorbing chemically bound water is most effective.