[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.

[Natsu]

Well, unless that cloud of chemical smoke becomes rain elsewhere, stuff seeps into the water, etc. That said, I've had some time to peruse some of the sources here and at least the nearby water treatment plants claim to be doing more testing, so there's that.

I'd still be more than a little concerned if I were nearby, though. And it doesn't usually take a partisan boogeyman to talk about better safety and prospects of environmental damage.

Part of the problem with that is usually exactly what you say: it really is too easy to ignore and it really shouldn't be.

[mandmandam]

> It's also safely localized

... It sure as fuck isn't. You need to get more news sources than CNN and the EPA.

[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.

[IIAOPSW]

That's a different, orthogonal issue. Look it up there's a bunch of tedious FRA rules about crash-worthiness which Europe doesn't have. It makes the trains which can legally run needlessly expensive and they wear out the tracks faster. The rules don't apply to metros and subways, but if the tracks have any switch anywhere connecting to the national network then FRA rules apply to the whole system. The result is that planners can't extend their metro via shared freight corridors. There are plenty of regulations already, and in some cases they are clearly counterproductive. Proposing to solve things by putting more regs on the pile is a dubious proposition.

[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”!