Inspired by this thread. My pick would be the death of Mother Teresa. She probably would have gotten a lot of coverage when she died. But she died just around the height of the mourning for Princess Diana. So she didn’t get as much news coverage. Are there any more stories like that?
Often cited in this context is the airliner which crashed in Queens, a borough of New York City, mere weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. It was on its way to (or was it coming from?) Santo Domingo.
In the 1984 Olympics, when Joan Benoit won the first ever Women’s Marathon event, you had to be watching live if you wanted to see her triumphant entrance into the Coliseum, with the home crowd cheering her on.
Because after that, ALL you ever saw was the second place winner (I think), from Switzerland, who struggled to do her final lap while barely being able to remain on her feet. I never once saw the footage of Joan Benoit again.
New York City mayoral primary on 11 September, 2001.
C. S. Lewis died at the same time that JFK did, so no one paid any attention. How’s that?
Aldous Huxley died that day too.
Grete Waitz, the second place finisher, was Norwegian, and finished strongly. Swiss Gabrielle Andersen-Scheiss finished 37th.
Gabriele Andersen-Schiess finished 37th in the race, which was completed by 44 of the 50 entrants.
When this topic comes up, I always think of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Both writers’ obituaries were buried (if they appeared at all) deep inside the newspapers of November 23, 1963, which were almost exclusively devoted (at least in the USA) to the death of President John F. Kennedy. Years after their deaths, both Lewis and Huxley (or, to be precise, their estates) continued to receive speaking invitations, among other correspondence, from people who assumed them to still be alive.
On preview, I see that dangermom and Struan scooped me. Forty-four years later, Clive and Aldous are finally getting due recognition…
Edited to add: And I see Contrapuntal beat me to the Andersen-Schiess clarification. Oh well, at least I posted a different link – both articles are worth reading for their particular takes on the event.
It was postponed so it didn’t need much coverage.
This happened November 12, 2001. It was going to Santa Domingo and it got a lot of news coverage in these parts.
I’m sure I’ll get slammed for this, but -
Britney Spears’s now seemingly-perpetual meltdown getting coverage over the Iraq war.
Sammy Davis’s anticipated death was overshadowed by Jim Henson’s.
Ditto Johnny Cash and John Ritter.
The deadliest fire in U.S. history was the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin. It burned over 1,800 square miles of land, burned down 12 towns, and left somewhere between 1,200 and 2,500 dead.
Nobody ever hears about it because it just happened to occur on October 8th, 1871, the exact same day as the Great Chicago Fire. Which in comparisson burned down 4 square miles and killed a few hundred people.
Harriet Quimby was the first woman to fly across the English Channel, on the day after the Titanic sank.
Wasn’t there a mass shooting on September 10 2001? I recall seeing something on CNN about it but by the following day it had ceased to be news.
Ted Kennedy might have caught more immediate grief for the incident at Chappaquiddick had it not been relegated to back pages by the moon landing.
Well Chandra Levy plenty of coverage from May to August of 2001, but was quickly forgotten in Sepetmber…
Part of downtown Montreal almost fell in on Friday, but the news wasn’t as big as it might have been because Quebec City’s flamboyant mayor Andrée Boucher unexpectedly died the same day.
Don’t know anything about that, but the Danny Almonte scandal was big news during the first 10 days of September '01. Now nobody even remembers it.
Gulf Air Flight 072 crashed on 23 August 2000 (143 lives lost), but received very little coverage as the Air France Concorde had crashed only a couple of weeks before and the airwaves were full of talk about permanently grounding Concorde.