I’ll start with the lamest example of the three that I can think of off the top of my head, and then go from there…
Charlie Sheen sure was a big topic of conversation for weeks on end, and then Osama Bin Laden passed away. Duh. Not Winning - anymore.
The astronaut lady who drove from Texas to Florida, to kidnap “the other woman” in the love triangle she was involved with. Oh… and then Anna Nicole Smith passed away. Wonder what ever became of the astronaut lady.
And September 10th 2001 was probably the last night that anyone cared whether or not Gary Condit had anything to do with the disappearance of Chandra Levy.
In sports, on May 1st 1991, Rickey Henderson broke baseball’s all-time steals record. Later that day, Nolan Ryan threw his record seventh no-hitter. Henderson held the spotlight for about three hours.
Ernest Shackleton spent one and a half years trapped on the ice in the antarctic with his crew. Their amazing escape (without a single death) should have been headline news in their home country of the UK. However, they got back just as WWI was starting, and never got the recognition they deserved.
I think the recent tornado outbreak in the South which killed 340 people has been overshadowed; first by the Royal Wedding, second by bin Laden’s death, third by Mississippi flooding.
The Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin killed more people than any other fire in US history, but hardly anyone remembers. Why? Because it occurred on October 8th, 1871, the same day as the Great Chicago Fire.
Well, maybe, but Princess Di did die first, on August 31, 1997. Mother Teresa died nearly a week later, on September 5. So her death was subsequent to Di’s.
On September 21, 1938 a Category 3 hurricane hit Long Island and drove right through New York, New Jersey and New England before finally breaking up in Quebec. The hurricane killed something like 700 people, destroyed over 50,000 homes and left property destruction that took more than a decade to repair. On September 22, Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler met in Munich to discuss the fate of Czechoslovakia.
January 20, 1973: Richard Nixon inaugurated for his second term as President.
January 22, 1973: Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, dies.
January 23, 1973: Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, and Le Duc Tho sign the Paris Peace Accord, signaling the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Unfortunately, a slight military action was taking shape at the time, and news coverage of Sharpton’s stabbing was pushed off the front pages. Gulf War - Wikipedia
I remember interviews with Sharpton later, and he was quite bitter over this.
Groucho Marx died only three days after Elvis and IMO ought to have been the bigger story that wiped out the earlier one. But it didn’t happen that way.
It was the day after; in fact Sept 12 Australian time is nearly 2 days after Sept 11 NY time.
I sincerely couldn’t recall, and didn’t bother to Google. Was there another high-profile death that occurred around the same time? (Off to search…)
Okay, based on the search, maybe I’m thinking of Georg Solti, who died on the same day as Mother Theresa. After all of the hysteria about (let’s simplify here) a divorced mom in a car crash, I was pretty upset that the media practically ignored two people who had actually, you know, contributed something to the world besides a couple of heirs and the tackiest wedding dress ever!