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The NYT does not have this barely at all. There should be a giant picture of the mushroom cloud on their front page to reflect the severity (potential or real) of the situation. It's shameful.

Wow you're right, only mention is way at the bottom of the main page, just a title "A Train Carrying Toxic Chemicals Derailed in Ohio. Here’s What to Know." No picture, not even a mini-summary like some of the other links.

I think that it is the NYT's policy to not put giant pictures of potential disasters on their front page to avoid being sensationalist.

I would not fault you for disagreeing with that style. Most importantly I think that it risks missing important events: at first they are either not verified (or not verified to be important, like here) and a few days later they are no longer newsworthy. But at least it seems that there is some logic to it.

avoid being sensationalist?

The Chinese spy-on-the-weather balloon debacle is the textbook definition of sensational yellow journalism. NYT has had constant front-page coverage of it.

> should be a giant picture of the mushroom cloud on their front page to reflect the severity (potential or real) of the situation

It was front page on Bloomberg. I admit I didn’t click on it. To the degree this is of urgent national concern, it’s in a rail safety bill we have months to debate.

Not sure when you checked, but right now it's literally nowhere to be found on Bloomberg. I count three stories on shooting down UFOs, though, and one on comedians finding side hustles as babysitters.

> when you checked, but right now it's literally nowhere to be found

When this happened. Nobody clicked on it so it fell off. (I’m still failing to see why this is a national tragedy requiring minute to minute updates.)

This is going to give a whole lot of Americans cancer. I’ve heard this described, by an extremely level headed commentator I trust, as “we just nuked an American town”. This story is way bigger than some balloon.

I’m not sure how to reconcile “this is the only thing people are talking about” with “these stories have fallen off all the top news sites because nobody is clicking on them”.

This story should get more traction. It isn’t because it isn’t of general interest. Not because of a conspiracy.

This is not reflective of modern news practices. There isn’t interest because that interest hasn’t been spun up. When all attention has been pulled to manufactured stories, it’s reporters’ jobs to pull and manufacture interest into things that matter.

> that interest hasn’t been spun up

This usually happens outside the news room, investigative journalism being the exception. The lack of environmental NGOs raising a fuss may be part of the problem, if you think spin is the issue. (I do not. I think most Americans simply aren’t concerned with this, and those who are, and have influence, are mostly looking at rulemaking and liability ramifications.)

I cancelled my NYT sub over the pandemic. I felt dirty supporting them even for just the word games.

Because this is a regional story being amplified by Chinese state media. The NYT not running shock headlines based on trendy internet topics probably has more to do with their editorial scrutiny.

No it’s not? There’s one measly story way down past the fold on the NYT homepage.

It’s nowhere on the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or USA Today homepages (I cmd+F’d).

There’s a tiny clip on the left of the Fox News homepage that’s tangentially about it but really about Tomi Lahren bashing Pete Buttigieg.

The most prominent is the New York Post, which has a headline about it being “worse than feared” after a bunch of scrolling past stories about Kathy Hochul banning gas stoves and Emily Ratajkowski hanging out with Eric André.

It’s since moved further down. Mike Pompeo is angry about balloons, which is clearly more important.

There’s probably some political issue around the incident.

Your comment would have credibility if three of the sources you cite weren't Murdoch mouthpieces. Also USA today is literally a printer and the AP wire service rewritten to a 5th grade level and with even more less information then the AP stories that are copy pasted.

I’m not really making any claim as to their credibility; we’re talking about what the news is publishing and these are the most popular newspapers.

I generally agree with you, and I also agree about the uselessness of meta-commentary. But this story has been ranking quite low on news sites, eg on the default) Google News it's not on the homepage at all and is 7th in the US news section which usually displays 3 stories per 'page' requiring scrolling. PBS Newshour, which normally covers environmental stories in detail - especially the kind involving long term problems like cancer cluster - only addressed it yesterday and then very briefly.

We need a better way to quantify media coverage to assess whether stories are under- or over-reported relative to others of the same type, but absent that people-talking-about-it is what we've got. I sometimes think HN could use meta-headings to cluster exceedingly obvious topic subthreads, because the top-to-bottom linear format is not ideal for multi-lateral discourse.

I know it could seem this way. And now that's true. But when it first happened big media largely ignored it or parroted available talking points without any real attempt to do meaningful reporting. But I agree that the impact on people is more important than the media critique.

Correct - there has been a total lack of coverage after the first day or two; it's completely dropped off most front pages, barely getting a blurb at this point. Far away from the header news sections/now relegated to back pages. The EPA should be providing daily updates, and the major news outlets should be syndicating these daily updates.

This is the largest land-based environmental disaster since Three Mile Island.

I just checked US News & World Report and CNN front pages - not even listed.

Yes because nuclear incident = more disaster then the anfo plant that blew up in Texas, numerous refinery explosions the BP oil rig explosion etc.

> Oh my god this is the only thing people are talking about. Please don’t do this. Let’s talk about the actual disaster instead of spinning up another useless whirlpool of meta-debate.

This may be true in your circles. But almost no one in mine even know this happened. It has not been a top headline in any of the mainstream news sites, I only learned about it by visiting alternative news. It's pretty disturbing how hard the news is trying to bury this story.

i feel similarly to you but i'm finding that people who are less online than i am have no idea that anything even happened in ohio. my media is full of coverage and lots of people pulling their hair out about the lack of coverage, which seems totally inaccurate. but my family who watch tv news and spend no time on reddit or hn or tiktok basically still haven't heard about this yet.