On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 8:24 PM, Kevin M. <[email protected]> wrote:
> MSNBC called on the carpet for failing to cover the Christmas > terrorism (as well as the Iran election protests). Could it be that > they don't have the manpower to be an actual news outlet? Or that they > burned their bridges with many NBC affiliates (to say nothing of the > NBC flagship news division) during the most recent Presidential > elections, so none of them will loan a reporter or even a live feed of > breaking news? > > http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091228/ap_en_tv/us_tv_msnbc_breaking_news > Andrew Sullivan blogged that all three cable news outlets dropped the ball on the Iran story this weekend, which may yet be seen as the biggest story of the year and one of the 3-5 biggest of the decade): http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/msm-massive-fail.html Like Sullivan, I have pretty much given up on TV news, and got my Iran news over the internet, but it is certainly believable. I can say that, when I checked in on CNN periodically Christmas eve and Christmas day, they were covering the terrorist attempt heavily (or rather, they were covering their own greatness in covering the event, as every time I checked in with them they kept repeating some variant of "we have been with this story from the beginning, when we mis-reported it was firecrackers". There may be an argument that the Detroit incident has been over-covered, or at least, not placed in its proper context. I have a daughter who flies back and forth from NYC to SFO several times a year (including in two weeks) so I am all for being vigilant about airline safety. Still, there are a lot of bad things that can happen to you from the time you leave your house to catch a plane till when you return home that are much more likely than being the victim of a terrorist incident (even at the level of the Detroit incident) Nate (the Great) Silver had a nice piece on this Saturday: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html Here is a taste: "Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures. These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune. (SNIP) There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning." -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
