TV Meteorologist FIred For Rebelling Against Alarmist Corporate Warning Slogans

Meteorologist Joe Crain was fired from a Sinclair-owned television
station, apparently after he criticized the unnecessarily alarmist
"Code Red" weather warnings at his station.

This is why I often hate it when large conglomerates own dozens of media outlets.  What follows is just one example of corporate bullcrap defying logic.

Meteorologist Joe Crain has been fired from the on-air position he has held since 2004 at television station WICS in Springfield, Illinois.  This, as is often the case, is all about marketing at the expense of accuracy.

WICS is owned by an outfit called Sinclair Broadcast Group. They're really a rather loathesome media conglomerate that is the largest owner of local television stations in the United States. Sinclair has both a marketing and political agenda that goes even beyond the nonsense of most major media companies.

I've written before about the evil Sinclair, how they force what had been trusted local news anchors to read pro-Trump editorial screeds instead of actually reporting the news.  Like most people, I want news, not demands from anchors that I support some politician, be they Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi.

Anyway, the marketing geniuses at Sinclair decided that every weather alert on their television newscasts should be labeled as "Code Red" in all caps, with a lightning bolt in the logo. Yes, weather warnings are good, and I dn't mind television stations doing their own spin on these things, as long as they're accurate.

For instance, there's a local television station, WPTZ here in Vermont and New York that markets "First Alert"- going as far as to label their meteorologists as, for instance, "First Alert Meteorologist Tom Messner."

A little cutesy, I suppose, but I can go over that pretty easily. They're fine.

However, Sinclair''s "Code Red" scares the pants off people with too many false alarms.  Sinclair's "Code Red" didn't make a distinction between, say, a brief local downpour and an extremely dangerous EF-5 tornado.

WICS viewers hated the "Code Red" nonesense and let anyone who would listen know it. Unfortunately, Crain was listening but his overlords at Sinclair were not.

Recently, Crain acknowledged the local distaste for "Code Red" on air.  He said, "A lot of people were not very happy with this over the last few months since we've implemented it on Storm Team 20.....That's evident by the thousands of comments on social media, letters to the editor, frequent calls to local talk shows."

Crain explained to viewers that the Code Red warnings were a "corporate initiative" and said that "behind the scense, any of us have tried to dissuade it for the lst few months, to try something else that's less controverial to the viewers."

The main problem with "Code Red," Crain explained, is that it's not nuanced. When the National Weather Service issues storm alerts or warnings, they use something of a detailed scale that gives people some sense of the degree of danger. Like I said above, the National Weather Service lets the public know whether they should be mildly concerned or panicked over an impending storm.

Code Red encourages just panic. It has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with marketing. If you scare people, they will tune in. People will hear "Code Red" and think they have to tune in right away to see about that EF-5 tornado that in reality does not exist.  The more people tune in, the better the revenue, accuracy be damned.

In a minor bright side, I suppose, WICS is abandoning "Code Red" in favor of another way of broadcasting storm alerts.  WICS, like some other Sinclair stations, are now using the phrase "Weather Warn."

However, Sinclair has apparently fired Crain.

People both locally around Springfield, Illinois and across the nation are NOT happy with this. A Change.org petition to bring back Crain has gotten more than 16,000 signatures.

This has even gotten the attention of Stephen Colbert, who had a segment on his show about Crain, which you can watch at the bottom of this post.

Yes, a television station or pretty much any employer can fire an employee at will. And many bosses don't like rebellion. In this case, though, Sinclair really stepped in it, and have screwed this up big time. It's probably too late to bring Crain back to WICS, but I hope he gets a good gig at another television station soon.

Here's Colbert's clip Totally worth the watch: