Centralizing the T.V. weather reports snows the locals

Los Angeles-based Allen Media Group, controlling owner of the Weather Channel as well as a portfolio of cable networks and 36 news stations across the U.S. concentrated in central states, announced Thursday the firing of over 100 meteorologists at 22 local television stations.

Weather segments on local channels, from Wisconsin to Mississippi, will be “hubbed” to broader regional or national sources such as the Weather Channel. 

Stations affected by the reduction include those in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. 

Hubbing increases network centralization, leading to reduced familiarity with communities’ agriculture and localized weather effects.

The swath of markets, from Flint to Huntsville, will see their live, local weather replaced with lower cost generic geographic weather reports and further AI-forecasting.

Led by Byron Allen of comedy show and political partisanship fame, the Allen Media Group owns T.V. stations in California, Oregon, and Hawaii as well, which are states struggling with unanswered questions about local meteorological forecasting gaps.

These layoffs of local meteorologists comes on top of earlier announced cuts at the Weather Channel.

The announced termination would represent a drop of over 2.2% of the U.S. workforce of meteorologists.

For local T.V. meteorologists in the affected areas, the percentage drop could be significantly higher than that. Off-camera, relatively faceless “climate” agency work and AI-prompting roles for meteorologists, rather than documenting and reporting the local weather, may account for meteorology industry’s predicted 4% growth in hiring.

Further, heavily invested-in weather apps have gained users. Yet an app’s human interest in people's preparedness for weather events can't compare to a local broadcaster’s.

Like a town crier, a local meteorologist warns people for the sake of protecting life, property, and food cultivation. It's a career of puzzle-solving and communication.

Students interested in science and social service may find meteorology a dynamic career path, when the liberty to form conclusions on weather phenomena is respected. Yet since local meteorology hits home, intentional reductions in local, independent working experts in the field can hit hard. 

When a partisan few hands control the filters on weather news and information alongside climate agenda-driven government weather agencies, the career’s magic can vanish in a cloud. Removing scores of meteorologists from communities for relatively untested and digital replacement systems is not going to improve the product.

Local experts serve by documenting and communicating factual localized weather history that federal and global actors may seek to bury. What can upend a narrative that bases itself on global-scale data quite like expertly explained granular local records that say, “It ain't so!” Truth or the devil is in the details.

A large T.V. network’s removal of local meteorologists from its Midwest holdings reminds one of the medical experts who were snowballed off-stage, deprived of their positions with patients for merely expressing professional views that conflicted with an overbearing agenda. 

Several meteorological commentators and writers have expressed concern about the expertise-purging entailed by increased hubbing. Is the broadcast weather profession heading for a politicized scrubbing?

Who would report, for example, the causative correlations between a given valley’s crop yield increases and carbon dioxide concentration?

T.V. meteorologists become cultural influencers who share their observations about nature's impacts on your home’s area. They ground the sky, connecting your sidewalk to the stratosphere. 

Who better than meteorologists to explore the precipitation of vinyl chlorides on lakes, farms, and neighborhoods after explosive train derailments?

Whose voices could better discuss the effects of sun-dimming clouding efforts?

Who can better analyze the recent, new, and ongoing fires by the coasts?

Who might make more germane observations of the recognized chalky, smelly fog this year, and who would better inquire about the strange fog’s origins and potential links to missing chemicals? 

Who can more appropriately ask if dumping DDT helped “fight polio” in a targeted way, or if wind flows exposed many more of us?

Who better to inquire if outdoor quality of life has been improved in the long run by releasing GMO mosquitoes?

Whose job is more relevant for talking with the public about “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025,” a paper by the U.S. government, and “Weather: Warfare's Next Weapon,” a CIA report?

Who would be more pertinent to ask why it might be that the two popular presidents with recent assassination attempts happened to be the two to have their inaugurations moved inside "for cold?”

With nearly endless questions to be asked, a drawdown of local meteorology would hardly be touted as such; was there ever a formal announcement that toll-collectors, welcoming travelers across bridges, would become a thing of the past? Rather, a demolition or diminution of the local meteorologist profession would likely be dished quietly, in line with Big Climate's need for narrative-control and Big Tech's attempts to display AI dominance to rival China's DeepSeek.

Spirited free expression is a dangerous thing to tyranny, the precise reason for the First Amendment. The inconvenient expertise and influence of local meteorologists, if paired with curiosity and truth-telling, makes them all but outlaws to government censorship initiatives as well as to AI search down-ranking algorithms. Their questions can rock the boats of the blue checkmark brokers, face the wrath of “fact checkers,” and get called out on strikes for posted videos. 

Today, one-time employers of local meteorologists appear to be partisan and government-interlocked entertainment and tech conglomerates. Doctoral climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry rained down her wits on her climatology colleagues, and meteorologists can likewise speak dynamically on weather knowledge, whether granular localized facts support or oppose any established narrative. 

Meteorology involves connecting data dots, across diverse models, to explain and forecast the weather in people's lives. Consolidating weather reporting into a more plug ‘n play, programmed system, unfortunately is likely to omit undesired dots with machine-like incuriosity.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

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