Now that Charley has done his damage and left, I can thoughtfully consider how the local broadcast news outlets did in their coverage of this major event. The best overall job has to go to WTVT-FOX 13 for their willingness to stay with the story from start to finish. Even as Charley was pounding eastern Polk County --- one of the largest counties in the Tampa/St. Petersburg media market --- with wind and rain, causing considerable damage, the other network affiliates couldn't wait to jump back on the network prime time bandwagon. And FOX 13 News tended to be more thorough in their overall coverage. A close second would go to Bright House Networks' cable news channel Bay News 9; their main problem is the same one they always have. They tend to tape an hour's newscast and rerun it for several hours at a time, and WFLA-NBC 8 doesn't get quite that lazy, they DO use the EXACT SAME SCRIPT for both hours of their early morning newscast from 5-7AM.

And I give kudos to Denis Phillips of WFTS-ABC 28 for being the first meterologist --- at least I saw while scanning the channels --- to note Charley's change in direction toward Port Charlotte. This was before 1PM, and he was especially cautious that it may be just a wobble, but his belief based on his Penn State meteo studies, was that this was the real deal. Guess they do more than play football up there in Happy Valley...

Being a Polk Countian, the decision by WFLA and the other network affiliates, WTSP-CBS 10 and WFTS to dump their coverage while Charley was still affecting a significant portion of their coverage area was rather inconsiderate. If it had been Hernando, Citrus, or Sarasota Counties which had been involved, the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games would have definately switched to PAX 66 as had been tenatively planned and the other stations would have readily stayed with local coverage. While coverage of news in Polk by Tampa Bay television stations has improved some (WFLA, WTVT, and BN9 maintain news bureaus here), there's still a way to go.