it might invoke, you know, REGULATIONS

And for all the reasons Cali was noting in the OP.

I thought the Canadian life really rallied on the market up until recently when a big scare cause a massive soul market sell off. It really comes down to where what soul stimulative policies the central breeders are running I guess.

I mean, damn man....how sad. They have to fix the runway? Bummer man.

Oh wait, doesn't this imply there isn't an end of the world at the top of the Washington border? There are other countries?

Which, when weighed against the possibility of total out of the blue man made disaster, the media has no clue how to deal with it.

1. Most of us relate to flying more than being near a railroad - and most have had some at least passing nervousness about it. So the media can do its sensationalizing thing, which is what it does best.

and 2. The plane thing doesn't bring up difficult questions. We can point a finger at a faulty mechanic or a faulty pilot, the story gets wrapped up neatly. The transport of hazardous materials, of crude, that's a whole other issue the corporate media doesn't want to debate.

... it leads

Yesterday.

I caught the blurb in the TampaBayTimes.

I was on a plane less than 24 hours after the crash.

I spent lunch at SLC airport watching coverage of the crash.

Well, maybe ....

I'm sure many Canadians agree.

"We don't have the massive budgets we once had, and so we are forced to cover news that happens within a major media outlet, so those "news feeds" can be routed over to the local audience." In this case, San Francisco NBC can have its reporters do coverage, and their coverage will get sent on to Omaha, and Denver and Chicago, etc.)

The Sacramento news station that we get in our area, they were covering a small fire that was burning up 200 acres. Meanwhile, a fire in my area had burned up more than 6,000 acres. Not a mention.

I kept placing calls, and they finally did a five minute piece on the larger fire. The story was told from the results of a phone call with one of the National Forestry agency people. they still didn't send out crews or anything.

Just goes to show we're not really getting 'real' news anymore - just 'convenient and cheap' news.

My household has basically quit watching the news, except for more extraordinary situations. (Massive earthquakes, fires that affect us or family and friends, a major political scandal.) the news we see advertised while we watch a few TV shows is such nonsense as (And I wish I could say I am making it up), "Tonight at 11Pm. Learn from our reporters whether the iPod or Drone have more advantages for you."

I don't get it. This is by far a greater disaster with regards to human life.

Agree completely.

all of Canada is in the back of beyond.
A plane crash also killed ten people in Alaska - have you seen coverage?

I've lived close to the Canadian border most of my life and I often wondered why we'd get very little news from Vancouver or Canada as a whole. It was like it or Canada wasnt there or something. I think they want to keep us isolationist and ignorant flag wavers.

because this is the only place I've seen anything about it

Don't watch tv, so can't help you there.

but usually if a story is making the rounds, I'll hear about it here and there. The SF crash was all over everywhere like it was the Second Coming. This train crash? Not so much.

What you're really saying, is that the local news services aren't packaging it up into the same convenient little bites as the Kardashian's latest heels in the air adventure.

I heard about it on the radio today. I saw a thread here and commented.

But I also agree with the first comment. I think the corporate media is less interested in covering a story that puts a bad light on fossil fuels and how they're transported. But it's not right to say it hasn't been covered at all in the mainstream media - I've seen lots of stories. Just not as much as the SF crash.

Oil companies: "Hey, NBC, CBS, ABC...want our ad dollars? Don't report oil spills. Mum's the word!!"

my mom warned me about the attitudes in the US before we immigrated.

Lots of people have flown through San Fran. Few have been through Lac Megantic. More people fly than ride on freight trains. So familiarity doesn't cut it.

Lots of people want gasoline and oil products but don't want pipelines. Pipelines, bad, nasty, evil. So the stuff gets shipped by rail? That's no good. If railroads are dangerous, pipelines ... okay? Oops. Back off, there. Got no huge eco angle.

Ah, let's blame lack of regulations. We need more regulations in this country to make railways safe ... for going from one place in Canada to another? No, no soapbox, no Big Story. Most Americans think of Canada as paradise for regulations.

The hotshot deaths. Forest fires, clean-cut young men with young families, nice human interest angle. Lac Megantic's downtown was trashed, but most of the dead seem to have been at a bar. Who were they? Uh, not identified. Do we have an emotional hook into them for MSM's viewship? Nuh-uh. A day or two later, and we still don't have a personal interest angle going.

What's the hook? Why should we care? Bad things happen everywhere. This might be important to people that live up in the frozen NE, near the Canadian border. What--all 28 of them? Even the Bangladesh factory collapse was a heinous disaster with an important hook: American brand-name label merchandise was made there, so we Americans are in some sense responsible. But a shipment of oil and natural gas on its way to Nova Scotia?

They got nothing. It's like many scores of horrible things that happen daily. Unless there's a hook--even something like a meteorite has more of a hook--there's no reason for viewers to care, no reason for the networks to pick up the story and do much with it. Why are the Canadians more important than Iraqis or Chinese or Zambians?

It hasn't left the top three BBC stories since it happened, for instance. Canadian events generally get less coverage in the US - someone could light off a nuke over Toronto and I doubt it would preempt any other coverage - but I've seen mention of what's going on in Quebec in various US media as well. It's not a blaring headline, but it's been consistently at the top of the 'other stories' lists on various sites after their top two or three stories.

Coverage style matters some too - most of the media here dosen't have the same "relentlessly hammer the victims" mentality that happens south of the border - which would give some of the more ghoulish reporters a lot less material to work with.

I'm not too surprised (or even too upset) at the plane crash getting a lot of coverage though. It's getting a lot of coverage up here as well, usually at about the level the train wreck's getting in foreign news. I find it wholly understandable that it's getting a lot of attention too - a large plane crashing and most of the people on board walking away from the wreck is extraordinary news, and is the sort of thing people would understandably take an interest in. Lac Megantic getting wrecked is the more important event, I agree, but it's still not completely swept under the rug of the US media and for the most part I can understand why the coverage between this and the plane crash is skewed the way it is.

Ane when it's a big commercial jet, we all shudder. So it gets the front-page treatment. Ditto, shark attacks. There could be a thousand cars crashing in a day, but one kid gets eaten by a shark, and it'll be big news.