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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
There’s probably some political issue around the incident.
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.
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.
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.