When the Atlas storm pulverized western South Dakota and its surroundings, almost every interview from the first several days was made within about 45 minutes of the Rapid City airport, and almost every image of dead livestock was taken from the same main road and/or interstate. Also, almost every story felt that the most pressing concern for those who had just lost their livelihood was that the government was shut down, and so it couldn't help. A couple ballsy folks were being fished for a quote about that, and basically asked back in response, "How in the hell is the government going to bring my cows back to life?" It's the same pattern. Because they had flown in from D.C. or NYC where the government shutdown was all that they were talking about, it MUST be in some way connected to a story about an early winter storm on the Northern Great Plains that killed trainloads of cattle.
I was overseas at the time, so I genuinely wanted to follow what had happened, and what was happening afterwards. At least for the first two weeks afterwards, the ONLY true reporting on what happened came from some Louisiana public TV show about agriculture because they had taken the time to call up a bunch of people who had been affected across the whole region.
It was a local story that obviously didn't deserve 9-11 levels of tragic coverage, but if they could have just actually reported what happened while shutting the heck up about the government shutdown ... it would have been appreciated.
Now Nebraska went through a different flavor of the same thing with the flooding. I now wish that they'd just stay away. I'd prefer it if local people would refuse to be interviewed by them. They don't really care about what you have to say beyond getting the quotes that they want to fit the narrative of the story that they had already devised before they ever arrived.