Blogtrek

Incredible media priorities

NBC News tonight (2003 January 1) showed an incredibly warped sense of priorities in its news reporting tonight. This past week was one in which a major disaster occurred. Entire islands had almost all life destroyed on them by Cyclone Zoe with its 217 mph winds. 2,000 people lived in these islands, and though these islands are so remote that information from them is still sketchy, it is likely that a huge number of these died. A thousand or more people dying constitute a major disaster and a major news story. It ought to have been the lead story tonight; it is possible that a number of deaths approaching what occurred on 2001 September 11 could have occurred, and that was a lead story.

Instead, NBC did not make it the first story. In fact, they did not even include it anywhere in their broadcast! They instead featured the "war" on terror and the injury of one person in a firefight in Afghanistan. To me this is an appalling lack of judgment in the prioritization of news stories. Someone needs to be done about NBC reporting. I can't tell what the other networks did, partially because some of them chose to broadcast sports instead of news. Google got it right. The story appeared as the second lead story on their news page. It is good that we have Google now, so we can hear news from wherever it comes, without having to put up with the antics of NBC and other networks.

(a cyclone is a tropical storm with winds exceeding 74 mph that occurs elsewhere than in the northwestern Pacific, the northeastern Pacific, or the Atlantic. Such a storm occurring in the Atlantic would be called a hurricane.) .