Hype makes fight.

The big news in Port St. Lucie, Florida a few Sundays back was that a 70-year-old woman tossed a knife she had been using to cut meatloaf at her husband--because he opted to sit in front of the TV watching football instead of preparing for Hurricane Isabel.

Imagine the scene. He's in his easy chair hollering about an incomplete pass and she's seen a gigantic swirling monster on TV heading straight for the U.S. coast. The television meteorologists were warning that it was no time to be a slacker: "Things are looking more ominous than yesterday for the East Coast. If you've been lax with your hurricane preparations, now's a really good time to catch up." The anchors kept mentioning that Hurricane Mitch killed more than 10,000 people in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua in 1998.

"The argument began," reported the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, because "the wife was insisting he make hurricane preparations for Isabel. tie refused and said that he'd get to it at halftime." Halftime! When the cops arrived, they found 71-year-old Robert Harris sitting in a "large pool" of blood on the bathroom floor. There were also hack marks on a bedroom door.

While door and husband were being stabbed, mind you, the hurricane was still some 900 miles off the coast. And not even headed for Florida. Apparently that's what a relentless media drumbeat can do to you.

Now, I don't want to let Mrs. Harris off the hook. But any sensible consumer of news might understand how today's constant over-hype, in which breathless reporters repeatedly turn regular occurrences into "events of the century," might make someone go a little nuts. Especially if all the other husbands on the street are already outside nailing up their plywood.

It was an overdose of global warming hype that caused some people to attack a bunch of Hummers in California in August. ...