“Let’s see if that cup of boiling water turns to snow”: TV networks send correspondents for some performative Blizzard reports, but not everything goes as planned

Less than 24 hours after a video of KWWL-TV sportscaster Mark Woodley doing a live remote for the station’s morning show in the middle of a snowstorm went viral, major cable networks were scrambling for viral video moments of their own of the record low temperatures.

Yesterday, CNN sent correspondent Lucy Kafanov to the streets of Denver for performative coverage, where it was -11 and felt like -20, according to Kafanov. The network kept coming back to Kafanov so she could throw a cup of boiling water in the air to show viewers how cold it was. Of course, the first time at 10:13 it didn’t work. An hour later, the water in the air actually turned to ice. The third time, just after noon, it barely worked. However, she had support.

There was a glass of wine in the snow by the side of the road, which Kafanov left there for several hours. It was indeed frozen solid, a good indicator of temperature as wine freezes at about 22 degrees due to its alcohol content, not 32 degrees like water.

At the Weather Channel, they had correspondent Dave Malkoff do the same thing, but for slightly more esoteric reasons.

“I’ll show you [how cold it is] with that hot water,” Malkoff told viewers from Louisville, KY, “not just to show you how it gets cold, because everybody does. I just want to show you how it spins,” said Malkoff, drawing a circle in the air with his finger, “You see how it [unintelligible] kind of squiggly as it moved away from me? It’s the wind that’s blowing now.”

Possibly the most viral clip of the day comes from Weather Channel veteran Mike Seidel. Seidel was out all morning at wind speeds of up to 50 km/h to demonstrate how poor visibility was, Holland, MI. Later that day, while Seidel was talking to a woman who was trying to wreck her car, he was addressing her through the car’s open door when he suddenly yelled, “Ah! Ah! Ah!!! You all have closed the door on my hand before opening the door wide.

“I’m fine,” he said quickly.

The woman answered unintelligibly and Seidel added: “You said you were an idiot. Well, you said it.” Then he threw to break.