From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Bob Garfield.

If there's one axiom that holds true for the hurricane season of 2005, it is this.

When it rains, it pours.

Good evening. Now it is Rita, the latest in a long list of storms that have made this hurricane season unprecedented, cruel, and ridlet.

Three weeks ago today, and tonight there is a new storm on a worry.

The hurricane is now category two, but it is forecast to strengthen over the Gulf of this. Tonight it's a category five. Hurricane Rita now category two, but it is forecast to strengthen over the Gulf.

Tonight it's a category five. Hurricane Rita now at maximum strength and heading toward Texas.

Storms are looking at all too familiar, unfortunately.

Even as the death toll from Katrina continued to climb, TV news by Monday had turned its attention to another gathering storm,

by all indications as treacherous as the one that had just ravaged the Gulf Coast.

It didn't take much in the way of imagination or memory to understand the sickening menace

represented by the swirling technicolor in the corner of the screen.

But with or without Katrina, those satellite images were

already well fixed in the TV lexicon. Storm coverage has a long history in broadcasting. In

1954, E.B. White observed that hurricanes were the latest discovery of radio. To radio people,

he wrote, nature is an oddity tinged with malevolence and worthy of note only in her more violent moments.

As for TV, many traced the beginnings of hurricane coverage as we know it to 1961, when a young news director in Houston by the name of Dan Rather,

buttoned up his rain slicker and headed out to the Galveston Seawall to greet

Carla, the first of many hurricanes Dan would cover stoically from the field.

But whether historian David Laskin, who we spoke to Thursday as Hurricane Rita barreled towards

Galveston, pegs the beginning of modern hurricane reporting much later, 1992, to be exact.

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