As others have said, it's what people react to. It's what people click on in their Youtube channel, it's what people pay attention to when they are watching on TV via their Nielsen boxes, and it's where people go on their web sites.

On top of that, weather is cheap. You don't really even need a real meteorologist on staff any more, as the National Weather Service provides forecasts that aren't available to most local weather stations, with supercomputers being fed weather data from dozens of radars, then crunching all the weather data for the entire midwest to provide forecasts.

In any case, it's cheaper than sending people out to do remotes, or to actually investigate something.

If the stations had any imagination or creativity, they'd do something like what Snowfreaks is doing, and provide ultra-local and extremely accurate weather forecasts using custom algorithms and data pulled from local amateur weather stations.

A couple of the local stations went all-local last Friday morning to cover the snow storm, all 1-2" of it. The snow that had mostly melted off of the roads by noon.