So what determines the amount a news coverage a story garners? This recent tornado in Florida, though tragic, seems to have received an unusual amount of attention. Soledad from CNN was on the red-eye flight so she could report from the location and it was first story for days on most newscasts.
At other times, natural disasters that kill the same amount of people seem to get only passing notice. Despite the carnage in Iraq and the Iran tension, was this just a really slow news week?
Would it have anything to do with the fact that every network had news teams and equipment nearby because of the Super Bowl in Florida?
Don’t forget that most of the TV people had equipment and people on the way down there for the Super Bowl anyway, so it wasn’t that difficult for them to hop up the Florida coastline a couple hours and do some on-the-spot reporting.
Newsfolk in Washington, D.C. talk of the Friday Evening News Dump. When the White House or politicians of either party have to release a story they’d like to minimize, they do it after the journalists’ deadlines on Friday. It’s too late to get on the evening TV news, and it won’t get into Saturday’s papers, because most of the reporters have gone home. By the time they can catch up, the story is stale, and the 24-hour news channels have already run with the scoop.
This trick is not new, and both parties have used it for many years. It works best when it leads into a holiday weekend.
The networks may have had crews and gear in place in Miami, but that’s roughly 300 miles away, or 5 hours when the roads aren’t littered with smashed houses. Aside from that, they were busy getting everything ready for the game. Unless they had a cub reporter and a spare camcorder, the logistics of de-mobilizing gear from Miami to cover a tornado and get it back in time is a bit daunting. (For big events like Sunday’s game, the remote trucks are usually semis, rather than the small vans the local evening news crews use.)
Ignoring tornados and football, it did feel like a slow news day yesterday. On the local news, far more coverage that you might expect was given to the Queen Mary 2 arriving in San Francisco yesterday evening, and a poor sap who struck a buried gas line while trying to fix his fence, leading to an explosion that wrecked his house.
Weekends are slow news day because there’s very little “official” going on (no presidential press conferences, congressional hearings or even big corporate announcements.
Tornados are very visual, so the news crew will go find them. (As they will for the Queen Mary 2 and a poor sap who blew up his house.)
One of my very favorite examples (in reverse) of this was the Taum Sauk reservoir in Missouri, which burst in December 2005. When the dam broke it sent one billion gallons of water through a state park. However, the site was 90 miles from St. Louis and the weather was terrible. As a result, the news crews couldn’t get there for hours. The pictures from the scene were lousy, and as a result, you didn’t see or hear as much about it as you would have if the site were more accessible.
We were getting SuperBowl score updates and stuff here on the news, in Queensland!
I mean, who the hell really cares? OK, the SuperBowl is huge in the US, but of no consequence to anyone in Australia except a few dozen American ex-pats…