I live in a hurricane area. We don't use the news for any information other than watching the weatherman stand in the storm and film, and satellite imagery while it's going on. We use noaa.gov, it has all those prediction maps. It's very good.
For those that haven't been through these, the predictions do shift up to the last minute, so we'll check the maps every few hours just to see where it's headed. They update more frequently the closer it gets. Dorian's path seems to have moved a little south since this morning. Also, most areas aren't what you see on the news; they like to show the exception areas as the norm (shocker).
I "still" live in a hurricane area, but less so than when I lived at the beach. As OP mentions, I only use NOAA's page. Anything else is flair or outright deception [1]. Florence was bad, but the video clearly shows the reporter hamming it up.
There are people that simply cannot afford to evacuate or otherwise choose not to. When I first moved to Wilmington, I was scared of Category 1's. After living there for a decade, I didn't even prepare for anything less than a Cat 4 - unless you count grabbing beer for the inevitable "hurricane party".
While I will accept the articles premise that people can't understand graphs, my major issue is in the study [2] they refer to. The surveys are all retrospectives on assessing uncertainty after the fact. It would be like asking people why they thought a stock would go up when it ended up going down. In the end, who's to blame? Where do we direct the pitchforks? Or is it simply a call to learning how the charts work? If it is the 3rd option, then Times is fearmongering a little hard in my option.
I'm also in a hurricane area - I understand, use, and really like the NHC maps as well. I'm not sure what those red cones in the slideshow were, but the definitely weren't NHC graphics.
Here's Dorian's maps:
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at5+shtml/144923.s...
For those that haven't been through these, the predictions do shift up to the last minute, so we'll check the maps every few hours just to see where it's headed. They update more frequently the closer it gets. Dorian's path seems to have moved a little south since this morning. Also, most areas aren't what you see on the news; they like to show the exception areas as the norm (shocker).