Mine "tragedy" really? - news events w/ disproportionate coverage

[MicroBob]

Mostly agree with ElD. They are making this a much bigger story than they need to. But what else is new in the news-media?

The thing that I noticed about the Utah situation was how hard they were working to get to these miners that were probably dead...yet they were NEVER saying that that was probably the case.

Yeah, sure, perhaps they could have found an area with oxygen and have enough water to barely be making it. Yeah, they heard a couple noises down there.
But I think everyone knows they are probably dead, right?
So why is that aspect NEVER mentioned?

I found it kind of odd.
"rescue workers are trying to get to the 6 trapped miners."

I am disagreeing with the approach that CNN, MSNBC and other networks took with their choice of language on this.

Friend of mine just got a gig as an executive director at Fox News. I'm not even sure he has assumed duties there yet. Might ask him what he thinks of my opinion on this one.


Also, found it strange that every freaking seismologist they found thought it was a mine-created problem in the first place but the CEO guy kept insisting that they were wrong and it was actually an earthquake.

He seemed extremely emotionally involved about the whole thing. And I wonder if it would be a better idea to have someone who is more objective making the decisions on this type of stuff.
His desire to get in there already and hopefully get them out perhaps is what drove the rescuers to press too hard and end up dead.


Regarding the Peru quake: GF's parents were out at some market in Lima when it happened but that city was mostly unaffected.
GF's parents coversation when it first started went something like this:
Mom, "Was that an earthquake?"
Dad, "No...stop being so paranoid."
5 seconds later...they're practically surfing on the sidewalk and everyone's panicking.

Their big concern are the aftershocks. They've been shaking off-an-on ever since the quake including a 5-point-something. Her Mom had to take a couple pills just to be able to get to sleep last night.

[NoahSD]

This is a really really big problem that people have in general. We're not good at understanding scale, especially when it comes to comparing personal things to global things.

[tubasteve]

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Z,

Not at all, really. I put Paris Hilton and other celeb coverage into an entirely different bucket when it comes to my evaluation of news coverage.

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I think this is somewhat silly. When fox, cnn, and msnbc are spending days covering stupid Paris Hilton's DUI/coke habit/jail time I think it is just as bad or worse as the other types of media distortion.

[tpir]

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The news is a form of entertainment in America.

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I had a scathing post typed out but this says it all.

[Shoe]

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http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/17/utah.mine/index.html

Coverage of this mine accident has been bothering me.

"Suffice to say yesterday we went from a tragedy to a catastrophe"

That's what was said by the governor after 3 rescuers died as part of the rescue operation for the 6 trapped miners.

Sure, the idea of being trapped in a mine sucks super hard. But, I dunno, in the context of all the tragic stuff that happens in the world, this just seems relatively minor in scope compared to tons of other stuff.

I dunno, maybe I'm just coldhearted, but I just don't really care what's going on in the rescue effort or anything.

Anyway, this is sort of a pet peeve of mine, when things that are somewhat rare or have some unusual twist to them get huge amounts of coverage that imo they don't really merit.

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IMO, the only catastrophe is the retreat mining and other dangerous tactics being used by this mine that caused the collapse.

This is America, we should be able to have safe mines and bridges that don't collapse.

[Howard Treesong]

I think media is biased in favor of sensationalism. The mine accident is a crappy event, but with only six people dead is basically a nonevent unless it presages mine disasters all over the country. The Minneapolis bridge collapse, with 11 dead, was more spectacular but still pretty much a nonevent. But because both show drama, the media vastly overexposes them. It's a subclass of the bias in favor of sensationalism that all the media has.

The drama of a possible human rescue or the showing of an immediate human tragedy is for some reason gripping to us in a shallow way. Media caters to that notion because the marketplace rewards media that do so.

Simply put, we are the enemy and he is us. Our society likes and seeks shallow, gratuitous analysis of tragedy.

[ilya]

I think this happens because stories about small-scale, local disasters are cheap and simple to produce. They also usually require little knowledge of world events/history to understand, and are thus easy to market to the broadest possible audience. It's also easier for the journalists themselves to understand the situation and write plausible follow-up 'shockwave' stories without doing a lot of research or knowing a lot of math/econ/etc

I wish I could believe that a narrow-minded patriotism that's really only a kind of provincialism and clannishness doesn't have anything to do with it, but it's hard to when Katrina gets so much more coverage than the vastly more devastating SEAsian tsunami (to cite one example).

Also, virtually all of the truly big disasters happen on a years/decades/centuries timescale, so if newspapers always focused on the most important stuff, they would be writing about the same issues over and over. This isn't to say that this would be bad, but people like variety, so it'd make papers way hard to market.

I think 9/11 is the only disaster in recent memory that did not receive disproportionate coverage in the US media, and then only because of the indirect consequences.

[xxThe_Lebowskixx]

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yeah, i read something recently which talks about the reaction of people in China during 911. They were like "3000 people died, what is the big [censored] deal? 13,000,000 died in our Communist Revolution".

The news is a form of entertainment in America.

[/ QUOTE ]I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into what you are saying, but are you saying people in America don't have real news b/c nothing really that bad happens here?

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my comment was off topic. i think point is just that America has run so well as a country that three thousand people dying is a monumental event in our history. i realize that the WTC in NYC collapsing has psychological affects, but at the end of the day, only 3k people died, right? How many Iraqis died in the war? Three thousand of our people die so we have to go out and kill twenty times that amount? Is there any question why we are the most hated country in the world?

Id suspect that people from other countries that have experienced genocide have different psyches, but ive never been to any so i dont know for sure.

[JaBlue]

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Three thousand of our people die so we have to go out and kill twenty times that amount? Is there any question why we are the most hated country in the world?

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ahh, so you've never heard of the "20 times" rule! Anything you do to us we do back to you 20 times over. I came up with this when I was 12 to keep my younger brother in check and pitched it to the bush administration with great success, as you can see.

[guids]

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yeah, i read something recently which talks about the reaction of people in China during 911. They were like "3000 people died, what is the big [censored] deal? 13,000,000 died in our Communist Revolution".

The news is a form of entertainment in America.

[/ QUOTE ]I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into what you are saying, but are you saying people in America don't have real news b/c nothing really that bad happens here?

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my comment was off topic. i think point is just that America has run so well as a country that three thousand people dying is a monumental event in our history. i realize that the WTC in NYC collapsing has psychological affects, but at the end of the day, only 3k people died, right? How many Iraqis died in the war? Three thousand of our people die so we have to go out and kill twenty times that amount? Is there any question why we are the most hated country in the world?

Id suspect that people from other countries that have experienced genocide have different psyches, but ive never been to any so i dont know for sure.

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Personally, Im happy that I live in a country where something like 9/11 is a huge major event.