Today’s Sunday Telegraph has a revealing article, Oops! TV crews left deflated as Rita blows herself out

, by Karyn Miller, including the following (underlining added):

Among the glummest faces were the huge crews of television journalists sent from Britain to cover the hurricane, many of whom looked as if they were reporting typical autumn weather in England.

The BBC had the biggest team, with a total of 34 reporters, producers, cameramen and others. Nine, including three correspondents, are based in New Orleans and 25 in and around Texas.

The Sky News team consisted of an anchor, three reporters, a weather forecaster, four producers and three cameramen – a team similar in size to the one that covered Hurricane Katrina. Throughout the day, Sky’s team broadcast updates on what rapidly turned into an anti-climax for television crews expecting to report live from a major disaster.

Jeremy Thompson anchored the rolling news programme while David Bowden and Alex Rossi were the reporters in the field, along with Stuart Ramsay from Channel Five who also did reports for Sky.

A Sky spokesman, who declined to say how much it had spent on its coverage, said: “It was important to have a full team because it came on the back of Hurricane Katrina and we were not there just to cover the hurricane but also the evacuation of the residents.”

ITN had only one reporter, Robert Moore, with a producer and a cameraman.

I suppose the sheer disparity in the numbers outlined above is because of “the unique way the BBC is funded“!