A Grain of Salt

The garage door creaked open as my car door banged shut, sealing me in to what felt like my own plastic packaging, like I was an action figure waiting to be unwrapped by the gleeful fingers of my employer. “Oh well” I thought as I maneuvered around Pete’s parked maroon Camry, “at least I’m makin’ more dinero than GI Joe ever did” (though he admittedly did have far cooler things to play with at work than I do). I made my way down Lindig St. and turned down Larpenteur, making sure to avoid the retiree doing his crazy run/walk sashay down the sidewalk, and motored down the road.

As I drove, I tuned into 91.1 KNOW, better known to listeners around the state as Minnesota Public Radio, or MPR for short. I like listening to MPR in the morning, mostly because I don’t have time to thoroughly read the paper before I head out into the unknown, but also because they are the only medium that can spice up the news with sound effects, a key element to making the latest news on the stock market entertaining. I turned onto Highway 280 heading south, finding traffic surprisingly and pleasantly light this morning. My little yellow car sped along the pavement and the sounds of today’s weather report began to echo through the cabin, always one of the more critical portions of any news update. The announcer, Cathy Wurzer, began by proclaiming that the January we just finished was one of the warmest in modern history with temperatures in the Twin Cities averaging a balmy 28.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Ms. Wurzer went on to announce that scattered snow showers were expected in the north and over central Wisconsin, that the high today would be 31, and that it was mostly cloudy in the Twin Cities.

Huh?

I stared out my window into the big, bold, beautiful blue beyond that was today’s sky. There was not one cloud to be seen, not even a wisp. Not one single element of condensed water vapor in any direction for 200 miles or more. There were not any “clouds” of steam rising from downtown Minneapolis as there often can be during cold days. Not even the dark cloud of the Bush presidency could be detected on this gloriously sunny day, the kind of day that reminds me how much I love this planet and how good it can be to us.

How could this have happened? Did MPR just get a bad weather report and not bother to verify it with the information being transmitted through their optic nerves into their brains? Hard to believe considering some MPR employees, if not all of them, likely commuted in to work this morning and saw that it was definitively un-cloudy this morning. Was it so nice out that the good folks at 91.1 simply couldn’t believe it was reality? It would be hard to blame them considering some of the gloomy weeks we have had this winter; hard weeks of gloom and despair, weeks when the world has died and is yet waiting to be reborn. Or was it, as The Boss would have us believe, simply that the MPR employees had been “blinded by the light?”

(My own personal theory is that they knew it was a singularly beautiful day outside and further knew that if they raved about it too much, nobody would show up for work. Or if we did show up for work, we would spend all our time wishing we were outside instead of throwing our backs into America’s great economic struggle, so it was best to convince those with a low enough IQ (or limited enough access to sunlight) that it was in fact cloudy outside and we should continue with business as usual.)

I guess my point in writing this is that if MPR can make the mistake of announcing to the public that it is cloudy outside on a day when that is clearly not the case, what other kinds of mistakes does the media make? To get this one right, all the good folks at KNOW (such an ironic station ID after this event) had to do was look out the window, and most of the time, reporting accurate news is not that easy. It reminded me to take what I hear, read, and watch with a grain of salt, to be skeptical of what is said or announced and have the guts to think for myself. Because, after all, if MPR can fail to announce that, for reason’s unknown, the Earth has decided to remind us all of what a wonderful place this is and how good it can feel to be alive, anything is possible.