If there’s one thing I couldn't stand in all the Monday morning quarterbacking about Hurricane Irma, it’s those folks who said it was all a lot of “hype.”

What would it take to get their attention, I wonder? You have close to 40 people dead in the U.S. and Caribbean. You have millions without power – which means without air conditioning, fresh food, hot meals, transportation, communications and medical treatments. No school and no work. You have a wide, deep swath of destruction. And you have parts of the Caribbean that are decimated.

Plus, as with any hurricane, the aftermath is sometimes worse than the storm. What made Hurricane Katrina such a killer – apart from government mismanagement – was the flooding that followed.

The days, weeks, months and years ahead will be difficult ones. Ask those still trying to come back from Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

So hurricanes are challenging. They’re unpredictable. Plus, just because they make landfall in one place doesn’t mean they won’t affect others. The strongest part of a hurricane moving north is right-front. Given a hurricane as big as Irma, which hit Marco Island in the southwest part of Florida, it’s probably not surprising to find flooding diagonally across the state in Jacksonville in the northeast.

Of course, those who say it’s all “hype” tend to blame the media. (Et tu, Rush Limbaugh.) They may have a point. All those standups of wet, windblown reporters trying to talk above flying debris are pretty silly – and dangerous. But having covered my share of disasters, both natural and manmade in almost 40 years of reporting, including 9/11, I have to say that most journalists aren’t trying to dramatize an already dramatic situation. Rather they’re trying to get the story, often from people who are running on sheer adrenaline, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves.

It’s not fake news, except to those who would deny reality.