In a time of fake news, when every disaster brings a fusillade of doctored and misleading viral photos, bringing viewers directly to the scene in the person of a trusted anchor has more value than ever. Deb’s story implied at one point that “the rise of social media” might render the practice unnecessary. But scrolling through Facebook or Twitter during Irma, it was almost impossible to know which images of devastation were real. Even the president’s social media director, Dan Scavino, tweeted a video that turned out not to be authentic. He shrugged off the mistake by saying that he was trying to sort through hundreds of images sent to him by members of the public.

Imagine a world in which TV networks didn’t send their anchors out into the field to report live on the storm. Among other alternatives, they’d probably rely more heavily on social media for images, opening themselves to the same kind of errors Scavino made. Without the live shots of the anchors, we’d probably see the same sensational clips over and over ad nauseum, as we often do in the wake of terror attacks. And they would give viewers a heavily skewed idea of what was actually going on outside at any given time.