Reporters, at both the national and local level, echoed that reasoning.

“I think it’s a fair question: Why would you have reporters standing potentially in harm’s way who are telling people to do exactly the opposite?” Mark Strassmann, a CBS News correspondent who has covered hurricanes for 25 years, said in an interview shortly after taking part in a live special from Miami.

“Part of that is that television is all about visual proof,” he said. “You want to persuade people that what they’re seeing is real and matters to them. And if they can see me standing out there getting knocked around, it’ll convince them that they should not do the same thing.”

Local reporters have fewer resources than network correspondents and this could lead them to brave some particularly unsafe conditions. In a Facebook post on Aug. 25, Jacque Masse, a reporter for 12News in Beaumont, Tex., said she covered Hurricane Harvey by herself, acting as an “M.M.J.” — industry jargon for “multimedia journalist,” or a solo television news reporter. She was her own camerawoman, producer and editor. The station came under withering criticism from industry watchers.

“Sending a single M.M.J. to cover a hurricane is not only one of the cheapest moves we’ve ever seen, it was dangerous,” said an article on FTV Live, a website that covers television news.

In those cases, reporters said, they have to know when to say no to their bosses.

“Somewhere it’s been ingrained in our minds that there’s a million people that would love to have your job, so if you won’t do it, someone else will,” said Hayley Minogue, a reporter for WKRG, a CBS affiliate in Mobile, Ala., who was covering her first major hurricane from Jacksonville, Fla. “So you get pressured into doing stuff for that, but that’s not really my attitude.” Ms. Minogue added that her own station had never pressured her in that way.

Whitney Burbank, a reporter for WPBF, the ABC affiliate in West Palm Beach, Fla., said that she had not been pressured, either.

“I’m looking at a tree that’s fallen through a concrete wall that’s covering half of a major road,” Ms. Burbank said after her 10th live appearance of the day. She described harrowing conditions that at times forced her crew to huddle inside their satellite truck. But, she said, her bosses place a premium on her team’s safety.

“My employers are pretty careful if something is unsafe,” Ms. Burbank said. “They don’t want you to do it. They don’t want you to do a crazy live shot in the middle of a tornado. If it’s too windy to go out, they’re going to say, ‘Don’t do it.’”