I have spent the last 36 years working in the news media. For many of those years, I felt it was a noble profession. I was a proud member of the Fourth Estate.

These days, however, I feel my profession has fallen down on the job, and caters more to the freak show crowd than real journalism. Case in point is the way this tsunami thing was handled today.

I woke up this morning and clicked on the San Francisco Chronicle website to check the latest news. I discovered a massive earthquake had hit Chile, and a tsunami was spreading across the Pacific and headed right for Hawai'i.

For the next couple of hours I tuned to the website of KGMB-TV for live wall-to-wall coverage of this impending disaster. People were told to evacuate the coastline. Those staying in hotels were told to stay on the 3rd floor or higher. This seemed like some pretty dire shit.

Then around 9AM, a full 4 hours before the tsunami was supposed to hit, I went to the Honolulu Advertiser website. There I saw the expected height of the tsunami at the island of Hawai'i would be 6 feet. At Oahu it was expected to be about 3 feet.

Huh? All this hoo-hah over that? The official elevation of Hilo is 38 feet. The elevation of Honolulu International Airport is 13 feet. At worst, this tsunami would provide a little coastal flooding. Nothing more. Nothing worse than a bad Pacific storm. Something the residents see several times a year.

At that point I turned off the wall-to-wall coverage and took a nap. When I awoke a couple of hours later, I returned to the coverage to discover the tsunami was about 3 feet at Hilo and less than 2 feet at Honolulu.

So why is this a big deal to me? Because this is exactly the kind of sensationalism that makes the coverage of the story bigger than the story. America was riveted for hours today over a non-event.

Should the people of Hawai'i been alerted today? Absolutely! But there's a difference between alerting the public about a potential disaster and freaking them out, especially when you know several hours beforehand it will not be a disaster.

The problem is desensitization. When the public goes on high alert for every little thing that turns out to be nothing, they are that much more likely to not pay attention when something really important is happening.

I find that true of myself in my own life. There was a time when a "Bulletin" or "Breaking News" banner across a tv screen would grab my attention immediately. Now, those are so ubiquitous that I just walk by the tv without even looking.