What would have been headline news over the last 2 months if September 11 had never happened? The news, as everyone knows, always takes up the same amount of space so what would we have watched for an hour a day if the terrorist attacks had not occurred? The fact that there is a spacecraft in orbit around Mars hasn’t been widely reported as far as I know. Is there anything else?
A lot of it would have been soaked up by the usual political stuff out of Washington: budget, tax cuts, news about unemployment and inflation figures, etc. And of course, who could forget Gary Condit?
An interesting side note. In 1993 there was a flood of historic proportion here in the Mississippi Valley. For 6 weeks there was basically no news except flood-related information. I later talked to a TV anchor who said that during that six weeks the murder rate, number of carjackings and assorted other crime that normally leads your local news did NOT change a single percentage point. The fact that it wasn’t reported did not stop it from happening.
It’s a little unsettling to consider the relationship between journalists and the news we do see on television and read in newspapers. It’s like they are part of an “observer effect” - as if they actually play a part in creating the news. Every two or three years a Sixty Minutes reporter will go to a Romanian orphanage, for instance. You can count on it. Those orphanages are there all the time and never seem to get any better but once every three years they’ll be “news” because Sixty Minutes has time for them. Reporters could presumably make news out of all the murders and carjackings that have gone on in the last two months as well - or chose not to. Weird.
Are readers tired of the war? It seems that the media is assuming that everyone is still fascinated by it…
I know that the pages of the periodical I work for are dominated heavily by the war still. Some of my non-war stories have been held, although they ran eventually, in favour of war coverage. My latest story relates to the war.
Your mileage may vary in the US, but up here the Alliance/Tory shenanigans would still be big news. Also, the campaign to replace Mike Harris, Ontario’s premier, would be bigger news than it is. Roy Romanow’s national medicare task force would get more ink. Just wild guesses on my part.
Perhaps in the US media, Condit would still be a big story, OJ Simpson Trial, part umpteen would have dominated coverage…
Let’s not forget the shark attacks.
There is currently a bit of a furore in the UK about a whole bunch of stuff that the Government has been doing or sneaking into the public domain whilst the media are looking the other way. For example, Railtrack - the famously shite company responsible for some appalling rail tragedies floated a few years ago to manage and maintain the country’s rail infrastructure - has effectively been bankrupted by the government, much to the chagrin of its shareholders who have been unceremoniously disenfranchised.
It is of course nothing new, and governments have for years used the cover of major crises to do dirty deeds but this time a spectacularly stupid spin doctor working for the Transport Secretary wrote an email to colleagues within minutes of the first plane hitting the WTC saying that (and I paraphrase) “today is a good day to release bad news”. Debate has raged about this, her scalp has obviously been demanded. Other opinions say that had she not been caught her colleagues would have regarded her as doing a good job. My view is that if your job is supposedly political news management, you’ve got to be dumb as a box of hammers to write something that can so easily be leaked and used against you.
The positive side of this is that since this incident journalists have been on the lookout for the government trying to slip out bad/controversial news under the cover of war.
Things I’ve noticed that would have been big news at other times:
UK has classified cannabis as a class C drug – effectively decriminalising it for personal use
Due to their helping with the War effort, Turkey and Pakistan have been given some rather advantageous terms by the IMF, which will no doubt be giving other poorer nations the hump.
Sanctions against Pakistan imposed after its nuclear tests have been lifted.
A crash in a tunnel under the alps killed 120 people.
A passenger jet travelling from Israel to Vladivostok (?) was accidentally shot down over the black sea by Crimean sioldiers involved in wargames with live Surface-to-air missiles, killing everyone on board.
A passenger jet at Milan airport taking off or landing in dense fog whilst the ground radar was off hit a taxiing light aircraft, killing all involved.
Don’t forget about the gunman in France who killed four before police apprehended him. That is huge news in a nation that surrenders to the Salvation Army.
The Oklahoma City bombing did interrupt the OJ Simpson trial coverage for a while.
When the Pope went to Cuba in 1998 there was a lot of coverage - then the Monica story broke and the press forgot about the Pope. Even Clinton joked about it - he said something about “I haven’t heard much good news since the Pope went to Cuba.”
Some government person in England on Sept. 11 told people “today is the day to send out bad news” and she caught a ton of flack for that.
There was a day a few years ago when the war in Kosovo reached crisis point - sometime in 1997 or 1998. It might have been the day the bombing began, I can’t remember. Up until that day Iraq had still figured prominently in the news - it was reliable fodder for journalists and received constant attention. The day after Kosovo became big time Iraq disappeared as if it had been a television series that had just finished its current season. The only place I ever saw it mentioned until recently was in the columns of the left-wing journalist John Pilger who kept on about how many people were still dying in the country because of sanctions. People like him are inclined to the belief that the media and the military have always been in collusion. The disappearance of Iraq from “news consciousness” was so sudden and obvious that it should give anyone cause to wonder.
kpm - it was a lady called Jo Moore who works for the Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers.
The election of a new leader for the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan-Smith, may have made more of an impact. Other than that I’d agree with longjohn’s list for UK audiences: Jo Moore, Railtrack’s collapse, moves towards cannabis decriminalisation, the Swiss tunnel fire and the Milan air crash.