BTW, wiki has a good list of births and deaths for any given date - 9/11:
(besides the victims of 9/11, the only death listed there is Calvin Trillan’s wife, who was an educator and a minor author in her own right, but hardly a well known figure)
People may search these lists for any events which seem appropriate. That said I’ve tried:
The Apollo 11 Moon landing
The sinkings of the Titanic and the Lusitania
Pearl Harbor
VJ Day
The Anchorage, Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes
The great northeast blackout
The first day of the Rodney King riots
The eruptions of Mount St. Helens and Pinatubo
The Lockerbie bombing
While there are deaths on a lot of those (other than ones connected to the big news story), none of them struck me as really famous. Happy Chandler died on the day of the Pinatubo eruption, June 15, 1991. Somebody people may have heard of, but hardly “A list”. Somebody else may continue this process for various other events.
Not a famous death story (although there were a lot of deaths involved) but on the evening of June 4, 1944, Allied armies captured Rome, the first Axis capital to fall and the largest European city to be captured since the start of the war. It would have been a huge news story - except that a few hours later, the Allied armies began landing at the Normandy beaches for the D-Day invasion and that became the headline.
Brad Renfro’s heroin overdose on January 15 2008 was overshadowed greatly by Heath Ledger’s death on January 22 2008. At least that’s what many sources say. I say if they were going to really report on Renfro, they had ample time before Ledger.
Yeah, I don’t see Brad Renfro’s death being a major news story even if he’d died months earlier or later. I had to look him up on Wiki because the name sounded only vaguely familiar, and it appears that he hadn’t had a leading role in a major Hollywood film in the decade or so before his death. Heath Ledger was far more famous and successful at the time he died, which was a couple of years after receiving an Academy Award nomination for Brokeback Mountain and a couple of months after the highly anticipated The Dark Knight finished shooting.
Lyndon Johnson died Jan. 22, 1973. He died early enough in the evening that it was on the network newscasts. The next day, Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. had signed a Peace Treaty to end the Vietnam War.
I wouldn’t say his death “never got coverage” but it was pretty much reduced to “In other news today…”
In a twist on the topic, the OJ Simpson low speed chase took place on the night David Hasselhoff was holding a pay-per-view concert. That killed his singing career (it was on life support anyway).