Mike Thompson slams Katie Horner

CSI:NY viewers weren’t the only ones pissed off about last Wednesday’s Armageddon Watch coverage on KCTV-5. On the air that night Mike Thompson made point of refuting Katie Horner’s bizarre wolf cry about a tornado in Johnson County. Now he follows up with a harsh post on the Channel 4 weather blog that calls Horner out for irresponsibly panicing the good suburbatroids of Johnson County about a tornado was never there. He gets to the point that KCTV is often critized for – using hype instead science in it’s storm coverage.

TORNADO GHOST STORIES!!!!!

My main point of tonight’s blog is this: Tornado warnings are supposed to be reserved for tornadoes! If you were watching our coverage of the storms last night, you likely saw me mentioning, or rather stressing the fact that there was no tornado in Johnson County (Kansas) . Don made brief mention of this below. Now, it may seem pretty nit picky to you, but I feel that the vernacular in severe weather warnings is very important. When you start issuing tornado warnings, you should be darn sure that: 1. The threat is real 2. You know what you are talking about, and can back it up 3. You realize that you are elevating the level of panic and anxiety among your viewers. To haphazardly throw out tornado warnings, just because you can, leads you down the path of crying wolf. You may get away with it for quite some time before the people you serve …the viewing public… begin to start questioning your credibility. If you do it enough, people stop listening to you, because they have lost confidence in your ability to tell one type storm from another. So, when another May 4th , F-4 type tornado comes rolling down the pike, and you start screaming tornado, tornado…who will listen, or believe? I take this very seriously, and it is why, last night…when another Kansas City television station made the irresponsible gesture of telling people in Johnson County that a tornado was going to drop out of the sky…I went a little bit ballistic. (I kept it controlled on the air…but I was more than a little ticked underneath) This was clearly NOT a tornado situation. We knew that, and so did the National Weather Service. It was a storm that produced 60 to 80 mph straight line winds…certainly a dangerous storm, and one that scared a lot of folks. But it was not a 250 mph tornado! When you put out a tornado warning…particularly only two years after a major tornado outbreak…the F-4 t is what comes to the minds of many viewers. So why elevate already scared to people to the level of panic? It’s not something I feel comfortable doing, and neither does the rest of the weather team…or anyone else here at FOX4. We want you to understand, that when we say Tornado Warning…we mean it. And we want you to be confident that we can back it up with good science…not hype.

Mike Thompson
Chief Meteorologist
WDAF-TV Channel 4