Hurricane!

Prime time TV has become obsessed with weather disasters, and "This kind of reporting normalises disaster and it becomes difficult to distinguish between Day After Tomorrow and CBS/CNN/The weather channel." The article that inspired Apocalypse was by Tom Engelhardt in Mother Jones:

Our media, of course, adores Xtreme weather events. Dan Rather's CBS prime-time news show, for instance, never saw an El Nino effect, a hurricane, a major flood, or an onslaught of snow that it didn't rush right to the top of the news; while those once Weather-Channel-restricted scenes of reporters, their bodies oddly angled, shouting into mics and staring into water-smeared lenses in the pelting rain of an onrushing storm are now commonplaces of the national news...