[refuse]

I've heard about this, but it is surprising how little coverage it gets compared to other things.

If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda (you'd also have to weigh it against other stories developing at around the same time).

I have to wonder why a story of environmental disaster (and presumably, negligence) making a small town uninhabitable isn't being milked for every drop of sensation that can be mustered. I'd wager they're getting something better than ratings out of this.

[pessimizer]

> If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda

It's not like it's subtle. There have been hundreds of Chinese weather balloon stories in the past week. Have there been hundreds of stories about this? US companies make money from stories about Chinese weather balloons. They lose money when horrific things like this happen.

There is a man who was shot twice (and grievously injured) in a robbery who is filing suit against the city of Chicago for its policy of breaking off high-speed chases (which have killed plenty of innocents in Chicago), arguing that they would have captured the perpetrator before they shot him if they had chased him during another incident. Local Chicago news is so determined to roll back recent reforms like ending cash bail and high speed chases in the city that we not only get multiple stories every day about the suit, we got multiple stories before the suit was filed about rumors and announcements that the suit was being filed.

[chaps]

A lot of these issues, unfortunately, exist because a huge chunk of Chicago media simply doesn't understand legal processes involved in criminal cases or even where to begin researching. It gets technical, quickly, and many of the reporters I know shy away from anything technically nuanced . That includes court reporters. So much of it has become political arbitrage, and policing/jailing institutions are well aware of the lack of understanding of their systems. It's beyond wild to me that many seasoned reporters out there who've been on these beats for years who don't even know how to answer fundamental questions through FOIA requests. It's understandable to a point because of the low pay in Chicago journalism, but it manifests as legitimate harm all over the place. I'm convinced we'll get there.

[nativeit]

*Insert obligatory reference to “The Wire” here.*

Newsrooms have been hemorrhaging beat reporters with in-depth knowledge of esoterica in a given field since the World Wide Web first began its thorough disruption of one of its first victim industries. It’s been decades since local news outlets have had the sort of manpower and institutional knowledge and connections to report effectively on things like criminal justice, local government oversight, environmental protection, or healthcare (among others). All of the talent either seeks positions with national outlets, or otherwise becomes stretched thin covering too many assignments, across too many areas, plus they’re probably now responsible for getting their own art (photos/video/audio/literature/brand packs/etc.) and deadlines have only become tighter with the importance of getting the story out first exacerbating an already stuffed and horribly problematic editorial calendar.

So you’re right on all counts, and it’s sadly by design as local news increasingly falls into the hands of a precious few companies and investment firms, all of whom are eager to thoroughly wring out what little value remains in these hollowed and brittle organizations.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Have there been hundreds of stories about this?

Chinese balloons are novel. This is not. It’s tragic. But its most memorable element seems to be the meta-debate around its coverage. That's boring.

[Natsu]

I think the people in Ohio wondering if they're going to be in a Flint-like situation, WTF these chemicals the average person has never heard of are, and what's going to be done about it are all interesting subjects.

Alas, I haven't heard much about them from those knowledgeable enough to chime in on the subjects and I'd love to.

As for balloons, they got boring last week, other than some airspace closures that only pilots need worry about. China has always been spying on us, the methods might be new, but not the fact of it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the methods might be new, but not the fact of it

It’s a diplomatic escalation with global geopolitical ramifications. If you have any business or personal exposure to China, or anything in Southeast Asia, that’s directly relevant in a way lives in Ohio, unfortunately, are not.

Also, Ohio is out of immediate crisis. Now is the time for investigation and litigation. The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep coming—that’s the drama one story has that the other lacks.

[Natsu]

For that last part, some people are worried it might not be. I don't claim to know enough about it to say who is right, but the people there are understandably concerned about what to watch for and want more info. Some of that might be worrying too much, but hey, a train full of hazardous chemicals did just explode out there.

It's not like we can't point to a time when things were majorly screwed up in a way that didn't just go away quickly despite the news moving on (Flint says hello).

[JumpCrisscross]

> some people are worried it might not be

Absolutely. But the problem is slow, silent and lurking in the dark. (It's also safely localized.)

I'm not saying this issue deserve eyeballs. Just that there is no evidence of a scheme to suppress. The cold, dark reality is most Americans aren't interested in the long-term health of a 5,000-strong Ohio town from an accident in which nobody died, for which there is no partisan bogeyman to blame.

[nortonham]

>ohio is out of immediate crisis

Is it? Sounds like an environmental crisis with serious ramifications

[TomSwirly]

Man, your priorities are totally inverted.

> The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep coming

The balloons may keep coming - the environmental disasters are certain to keep coming.

[naasking]

It's not novel that a train derailed spilling toxic chemicals into a small town literally weeks after Congress forced a settlement on train workers who wanted to strike partly over safety concerns? On the facts it's frankly a huge scandal.

I think the coverage tells quite a different story though, namely distractions on external "enemies", like Chinese balloons, providing cover for corporate sponsors that fund the political parties and buy ads on the major networks. Unregulated capitalism at its finest.

[JumpCrisscross]

> not novel that a train derailed spilling toxic chemicals into a small town literally weeks after Congress forced a settlement on train workers who wanted to strike partly over safety concerns?

No, it's not. Over a thousand trains derail every year [1][2]. We have superfund sites under millions of Americans [3] that even locals can sometimes barely muster a bother with.

We also have no evidence this derailment was caused by an issue the recent deal forced, e.g. unpaid sick time. (It could have been. That would be a story.) But in the meantime it's not novel unless you're into trains or from that region. Exhibit A of that is the most interesting thing we, on Hacker News, can find to discuss about it being the meta debate.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/3539221-how-often-do-trains-der...

[2] https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/publicsite/Que...

[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/superfund/

[duckmysick]

> Over a thousand trains derail every year

How many of them require a controlled burn of its content that forces nearby citizens to evacuate?

> We have superfund sites under millions of Americans

How many of them are a result of a derailed train?

Yes, separately those events aren't novel. Their intersection is.

[TomSwirly]

You: "We are constantly fouling our environment in the most horrible ways, so there's no point in even thinking about it!"

> Over a thousand trains derail every year

How many of them are filled with toxic chemical substances that force the evacuation of a town?

[mc32]

I think it's simpler?

With the balloons you have someone to point to and pin the blame who is not you.

With derailments and the recent acrimonious railworker labor agreement still in the rearview, the blame can't be cast far away; so the play is to ignore it and hope it fades.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the blame can't be cast far away

From whom? The implicit assumption in this is that the powers that ended the railroad strike are perfectly aligned with the media. Or that bipartisan Congressional idiocy doesn’t get called out in the press. There are loads of powerful people who would benefit if this became a story. They’re not because it’s a bad story for national interest. Nobody died. It’s getting cleaned up. It happened in Ohio.

[trashtester]

Conservatives don't want to stir up anti-industry sentiments.

Progressives don't want to stir up anti-railroad sentiments.

[luckylion]

> US companies make money from stories about Chinese weather balloons. They lose money when horrific things like this happen.

The carrier will lose money. But a news company would make money, wouldn't they? Bad news is good news after all, and environmental disasters are bad news.

[freen]

Likely there is considerable overlap in ownership between the handful of railway companies that dominate the market and handful of media companies that dominate the market.

[whatshisface]

Plus advertisers (which could include chemical plants etc) are their clients.

[JumpCrisscross]

> advertisers (which could include chemical plants etc) are their clients

The closest in the top 200 is Berkshire Hathaway [1], because they train. Also, this media hypothesis predicts Google, Pfizer, Amazon and Walmart are media darlings. (And that Apple is not.)

[1] https://advertisers.mediaradar.com/Top_Print_Advertisers

[WeylandYutani]

I think jingoistic China bashing pays better than putting the spotlight on America's various problems and shortcomings.

They did it in the 1970s and aside from brilliant Hollywood movies it wasn't a good decade for America. The less introspection the better as far as the media and political interests are concerned.

[mc32]

How is it jingoistic when China is flying warplanes over Taiwan and their media is now making claims the US has flown 10 balloons over their territory and supposedly were about to shoot down one of them and feign ignorance about the ones they sent over to us? Or are you saying both sides are being jingoistic?

[TylerE]

Trains derail all the time. It’s dog bites man, not man bites dog.

[xbmcuser]

Your dismissal make the ops point. The train derailment is not the news the environmental disaster that is happening because of it is the news. But you only know about the train derailment not much about the environmental disaster which should have been milked for views by the media normally.

[TylerE]

No, I know about it because I read it on the my times the day after it happened.

[jessaustin]

It isn't always "Chernobyl in Ohio", as locals are calling it. Although, that is becoming more common. If only the rail industry were regulated... maybe we need to dig up Teddy Roosevelt?

[IIAOPSW]

The rail industry is regulated. In certain ways over and in certain ways under. Eg, there's very little sense to the requirements a passenger train needs to reach to run on the same rails as freight, and Europe does it safely all the time.

[TylerE]

Not so much a matter of safety as that it’s the freight railroads that own the rails, whereas is most of Europe the infrastructure is mostly government owned, or in some cases was and is now (sorta) privatized but still under a sort of open access model.

[jessaustin]

It isn't regulated in ways that matter. We're down to five Class I American freight railroads. (So we're not quite to Klobuchar's monopoly board... just wait!) Their networks overlap even less than one might think, so there is effectively no competition. Asshole billionaires like Warren Buffett aren't even trying to provide good service, because they figure they make more money burying the organizations under mountains of debt, which is why they have paid the Biden administration to crush their union employees. Over the last several decades, rail freight charges and derailments have exploded while the amount of freight shipped has actually dropped. That's one of the main reasons we have to contend with so many semi trucks on our highways.

In many industries, commercial competitors discover when regulators have shirked their duties. In the rail industry, with no effective competition, many theoretical regulations are not actually enforced. This problem has gotten worse over time.

Your concerns about Amtrak may be valid, but they are orthogonal to the topic at hand.

[WalterBright]

WA state passed a law that says a cop cannot chase a suspect unless they committed a violent crime. This resulted in a surge of crimes where the suspect driver just flips off the police and drive off. Common crimes resulting from this:

1. catalytic converter thefts

2. thieves steal a car, ram it into a store, loot the store, drive off in another stolen car

[TomSwirly]

And yet almost all the rest of the world has these rules, and we don't see crime waves.

To me, you're describing the incompetence of your police forces.

> thieves steal a car, ram it into a store,

This is really considered a non-violent crime in the US?

I live in a city where car chases would be impossible. And yet there are criminals here, and they have a higher apprehension rate than in the US.

If this crime happened here, they would use drones, helicopters and roadblocks. They get way ahead of the escaping criminal. The different police departments cooperate well here, so you can't just drive to another area.

Which is why, generally, criminals dump their car almost immediately and try to escape on foot.

[iinnPP]

It's most likely 3 different violent crimes according to FBI:

Definition. In the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses that involve force or threat of force.

[notch898a]

Um if a person drives a car into an occupied structure with people is that not violent? If you drove into the police station the officers would say they feared for their lives and open fire.

[btilly]

Presumably they do it at night when nobody is around to be hurt. And hopefully nobody reports it to police in time.

[mikrotikker]

You should enter the Olympics for those mental gymnastics.

[WalterBright]

Yes, that's exactly what they do.

[duckmysick]

Catalytic converter thefts are up across the country. Does it mean all other states passed similar laws too?

Or maybe there are other reasons, like their high value and relative ease to steal.

[WalterBright]

Those thefts surged after the "no chase" law went into effect.

[duckmysick]

Catalytic converter thefts surged in recent years elsewhere in the United States and also in the United Kingdom and France. Those places didn't get a new "no chase" law. Either the state of Washington has an unusual reach or there's a different explanation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64057742

https://www.tf1info.fr/justice-faits-divers/video-vols-votre...

[nativeit]

Post hawk air go prompter hawk.

Thanks phonetical memory of television’s “The West Wing”!

[nimbius]

Unsurprising. Even the love canal disaster in the US faced massive disinterest before it was quietly revealed to have been a cataclysmic environmental contamination. It boils down to this:

- rail fired a ton of employees a while ago and is now seeing serious issues due to mismanagement

- government oversight is a moderate Republican masquerading as a liberal democrat and just wants the clout from successful negotiations but the concep of most government oversight in the US is hold music at best.

- this city does not threaten harm or inconvenience elites.

- reporting this issue harms and threatens elites and could see a ripple effect during a recession. Rail is a primium mobile for most of wealths investments at some level.

[TomSwirly]

Quibble: "uninterest". "Disinterest" means "impartiality". Disinterest is good.

I can't quibble with any of the rest of your argument, though.

[kevviiinn]

Also add on that the rail workers tried to strike over the issues and Biden was like "lol nope"

It's just capitalism being capitalism in the end

For all of you who down vote:

https://time.com/6238361/joe-biden-rail-strike-illegal/

[Izkata]

> Biden decided the broader economy was a bigger priority than 100,000 freight rail workers having any paid sick leave in their next contract. After campaigning as the most pro-union presidential candidate in history, Biden signed into law a measure that makes a rail strike illegal.

Forcing it like that is not capitalism.

[salawat]

...Sounds like a great opportunity for everyone to resign simultaneously.

Sure be a pity if you couldn't find enough people to hire to do all that train work needing to be done. Not a strike if everyone just says "Fuck it" and leaves.

[mikrotikker]

It would be catharthic but they might have children and mortgages

[weard_beard]

Set up a gofundme. I'll donate.

[ChickenNugger]

The greatest trick capitalism ever pulled is convincing people that it's not a form of government.

[nativeit]

Among its greatest modern hits is “gofundme.com”. Crowdsourcing social policy! It’s the New New Deal—-we took everything great about helping the unfortunate, but without any of the pesky oversight, collective participation, democratic processes, or predictability of your grandparents New Deal. Welcome to the Welfare State II - The Reapportioning! This new social fabric is fresh, capricious, and heavily favors those who bring an existing marketing and outreach apparatus…y’know, the needy people with a solid PR firm.

Public school teacher can’t afford treatment for their cancer? Go Fund Them! Favorite politician indicted for criminal fraud and campaign finance violations for paying for their previous indictment’s legal fees using campaign donations? Go Fund Them! Local dive bar threatened with closure unless they install flushable toilets in the restrooms? Go Fund Them! Single mother of three facing another night in the cold without enough to eat? Our thoughts go out to them, maybe if their mother can pass a urine screen and remain at a single address long enough to fill out the requisite forms and has successfully completed their probation on that loitering charge then they might get a few bucks from Uncle Sam…you never know, because with Go Fund Me anything is possible!

[kevviiinn]

That's exactly the thing, get people to hyper focus on the individual and they miss the forest for the trees.

[api]

It’s not getting much play because that area is poor.

There have been regions of West Virginia that have had problems with potable tap water for years and it gets no press at all.

If Aspen, CO or East Hampton, NY had this kind of event there would be a national state of emergency and possibly a holiday added to the calendar. Never forget.

[throwawaylinux]

It's because Political-Corporate Environmentalism is not actually about helping the environment, it is about coopting the environmentalist movement to consolidate wealth and power.

Where those two things intersect is coincidental. Reducing greenhouse gas pollution might be a great thing, but the ruling class sure isn't counting on that effort costing them any money. So if they can't see a way to make money or win votes by pushing this train derailment story they won't.

[__MatrixMan__]

I've often wished for something that I'm calling (in my fiction) The Ministry of Indices.

It would be their job to rank things. Things like media coverage. We could turn to the MoI and see that this chemical spill got a 4 and then compare with other events.

Sure, it's subjective all the way down. People will always quibble about the outputs of services like that. But having a number that some expert (statistician?) or organization thereof came up--even if you disagree with them--with would make for more nuanced conversation and decision making around that thing.

[IIAOPSW]

IIRC there's a few articles on 538 that do some crude-but-objective analysis like this.

[anigbrowl]

Last week has been full of horrific earthquake news, with the balloon nonsense as light relief. Couple that with local authorities and the freight hauling corporation saying that everything is fine, and I'm not surprised it flew below most people's radar. I submitted a story about it on Saturday and hardly anyone was interested.

[vel0city]

I don't take the US military getting spooked enough to finally use F-22s to actually shoot something down, and have those somethings be publicly unidentified, as "light relief".

All in all, seems extremely concerning to me.

[pers0n]

I think it was political pressure at the end

[ChickenNugger]

>I've heard about this, but it is surprising how little coverage it gets compared to other things.

Probably because the most current, most related story is about how Biden + Congress just recently killed a rail worker strike. And the complicit media isn't going anywhere near that: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

They're covering it as "averting a strike" as if that's a good thing to make striking illegal.

[cyanydeez]

Because the guilty party are ad buyers.

[WillPostForFood]

Don't think Norfolk Southern is a big ad buyer.

[blockwriter]

Berkshire Hathaway owns 14%, and BH definitely buys ads.

[7speter]

I'm pretty sure the only way I know their name is from their commercials on CNN, tbh

[bsder]

Because if the media starts covering it hard, way more than half the population of the US will plug their ears and start saying "LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" really loudly.

If this gets coverage, suddenly lots of inconvenient questions start popping up around monopoly, safety regulations and OSHA, and union workers warning about this 2 months ago.

But, hey, everybody got their Amazon packages by Christmas, so if a piece of shit town in Ohio has to pay the price that's just the way it goes, knowwhatimean?

[nilespotter]

> union workers warning about this 2 months ago

First I've heard that, got a reference?

[weard_beard]

Union negotiations shut down by Biden and Congress included safety reforms regarding car length and working hours. Both were factors in this derailment: https://www.rutgers.edu/news/why-did-government-step-prevent...

[ballenf]

It would be nice when the dust settles to have a single bad actor to blame instead of systemic negligence, decades of inadequate maintenance or the like. Hopefully the investigation findings will reflect willingness to assign clear blame where it belongs.

[bsder]

It also included limits around the scheduling systems that are being used to overrun the infrastructure as well as maintenance requirements.

[robertoandred]

No, the factor was a broken car axle.

[r85804306610]

from another thread, https://time.com/6238361/joe-biden-rail-strike-illegal/

[SilasX]

Can you quote the part where union leaders are warning about something in the way the grandparent describes? I’m not seeing it.

[Avshalom]

I mean it's not a union leader but it is about train derailment in northeast ohio

https://twitter.com/SawyerHackett/status/1625295841769431046

[r85804306610]

you're right, the other comment led me astray and i didn't check. it's just partisan trash. so to make up for it,

Wp starts its `background` analysis <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_...> with `The rise of precision scheduled railroading has resulted in resource and staffing cuts; to compensate railroad companies have enacted strict attendance policies for employees. These policies eliminate any free time which workers have, requiring them to be effectively on-call for weeks at a time. Workers have complained of increased levels of stress and fatigue.` The bulk of the argument is supported by this vice article <https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp9m8/what-choice-do-i-have...> which is frankly horrifying. It's a bunch of quotes from train conductors talking about falling asleep, being tired, taking caffeine pills, etc. It ends with a 2020 derailment. "A BNSF TRAIN CARRYING OIL TANKERS DERAILED IN WASHINGTON STATE IN 2020. WORKERS ARE WORRIED MORE CRASHES LIKE THIS WILL OCCUR UNDER THE NEW ATTENDANCE POLICY."

Wp again "Unions representing about 17,000 workers threatened to strike over the points system, but BNSF Railway sued and won a restraining order to prevent the unions from striking. The Railway Labor Act grants Congress the authority to intervene in any railway or airline strike. Under this authority, the National Mediation Board has mediated negotiations between multiple freight railroads and unions starting in June 2021." and there's your crux.

then a bunch of back and forth happens, and then it ends with biden/congress/senate doing their thing. it seems like the gist of the forced solution was to raise salaries and some sick leave, but no other mitigations.

wp again, "Writing for Jacobin, Barry Eidlin, associate professor of sociology at McGill University, said the message sent to the rail workers by the president and Congress was "shut up and get back to work." The Biden administration's intervention in the dispute was condemned by over 500 labor historians in an open letter to Joe Biden and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh."

[mikrotikker]

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

[everforward]

I think it falls outside what the average viewer understands well, so it's hard to get that visceral emotional response. We're talking chemicals outside the average lexicon, which are then burned and turned into other weird chemicals, which may or may not affect the water table (and the water table itself is not commonly understood or referenced).

I just don't think there's a good hook here. The topic is complicated, the people impacted aren't a minority, so there just isn't a good single-sentence headline to drive outrage.

[irthomasthomas]

If anyone has insider information about this train derailment, and the decision to set it alight, or the political background (or any of the other three train derailments this week), you should contact James O'Keefe at project... oh, er, never mind.

[Accujack]

I wonder about who is pushing narratives about this vs. the balloons in an attempt to distract the public, but I can explain why the derailment isn't much of a story.

It's because it's being handled fairly well. There is a cloud of smoke that's scaring people, but it's "ordinary" smoke. There's no environmental apocalypse that's going to make that town "uninhabitable". There will be after effects from everything associated with an industrial accident, including economic and legal repercussions, but the actual accident is being managed.

People seem very ignorant of the science involved with the situation and very accepting of conspiracy narratives, which is unfortunately no surprise given the last 6 years in this country.

[UtopiaPunk]

There are various reports of animals in the area getting sick or dying in unnatural ways, so that is unsettling. And there's also the incident where a journalist who was trying to cover the incident was arrested. So it doesn't seem like it is being handled well, imo.

Lots of discussion is occurring on Twitter, so people seem interested. The news coverage of it just seems superficial. Like, it's not zero, but they seem to be doing the bare minimum on a story where lots of people want answers. Give us the journalism so we can hold people accountable instead of spinning up conspiracies.

[mikrotikker]

The conspiracies serve to help the parties at fault.

[naasking]

> It's because it's being handled fairly well.

Even if that were true, which is debatable, it should be a huge scandal that this happened at all literally weeks after rail workers tried to strike over safety issues and were forced back to work, and that Obama required train brakes to be upgraded, then softened the requirements after corporate pushback, which Trump then repealed and Biden failed to reverse. There is a lot to say on this topic and no one in the mainstream is saying it.

[Accujack]

I agree that that is where the attention should be - on the rail system.

[mikrotikker]

You must be joking.

[humaniania]

Instead of speculating about what the tally might look like and making assumptions based on your guesses maybe you should get real data to validate your hypothesis?

[mc32]

It is pretty odd. One hopes the story will get picked up and disseminated more widely and create a necessity for authorities to react.

So far we have not heard from the secretary of transportation/

Biden has not bothered to shuffle himself over there to appease the population with platitudes about his deep interest in the safety of the population and worry for the environment and how he's going to hold those at fault "accountable" -che sera sera, as they say.

So far, crickets... but quite disconcerting is the apparent disinterest in the story by environmentalists.

[jahewson]

Imagine you’re a reporter, do you want to rush down to the toxic accident nobody is correctly accessing or containing? Didn’t think so.

[ramesh31]

>have to wonder why a story of environmental disaster (and presumably, negligence) making a small town uninhabitable isn't being milked for every drop of sensation that can be mustered.

Trains crash. Accidents happen. It's about as newsworthy as a severe thunderstorm. Sad for the people involved, but true nonetheless.

[sebkomianos]

You can't really believe that brain-damaging chemicals in the air (and soil and water) is the same thing with lightnings in a severe thunderstorm!

[ramesh31]

>You can't really believe that brain-damaging chemicals in the air (and soil and water) is the same thing with lightnings in a severe thunderstorm!

To a news cycle it is. There will surely be longform thinkpieces, investigative journalism, and maybe a Peabody or two to come out of this in a year. But as far as national headlines, simply nobody cares about a train wreck with zero casualties somewhere in the midwest.

[s5300]

>>simply nobody

Mmm… I love sociopaths…

Let’s pump more CO2 into the air because simply nobody cares about the global South & it will make me a bit of money I can take a vacation with.