"WHY IS THE MEDIA IGNORING THIS?"

This is a curious phenomenon I’ve been following for more than a decade now. It happens around everything from environmental issues (such as fires in the Amazon or melting polar ice) to social ones (like protests or police shootings). Commonly, a week or two after I’ve been seeing and hearing almost nothing but reports and articles on a particular issue, a million people start posting "No one is talking about it", "Why is no one talking about this?", "What the hell is going on and why is the media ignoring it?", and whole pile of variations on this theme.

Some love to disregard these, usually suggesting such posts come from bots or are just obvious noise. They seldom appear to be so, however. Most seem to be the outputs of serious people attempting to be serious. Alternatively, the issue tends to be framed as political or ideological, biased or motivated by a clear agenda, and disregarded on those grounds. But, again, that’s not what I see when I go looking to try to understand this. I find Stanford grad students, truck drivers, new immigrants, beach bros, cattle ranchers, folks in local government or in Congress, MAGA moms from Florida and eco warriors in the Pacific Northwest... really the whole gamut. Some have 10 followers and others millions. Some of their posts have tens of millions of views and others fewer than a dozen. So what is this about?

A TRAIN ACCIDENT

The event of interest here was the train derailment that took place a week ago in East Palestine, Ohio. Now, the first thing to mention about train derailments as a phenomenon is that — as I learned after the catastrophe at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, which totally decimated that town — this sort of thing happens so frequently (over a thousand annually, three per day, in Canada alone over the last decade) most are not covered in the news. Only when they occur in populated areas or have a significant impact, such as disrupting travel or trade, fouling a waterway or despoiling provincial or state park, do they get much media attention.

(I did a quick search the other day when I started looking at this, back on the 13th, and came up with three major derailments in three different corners of the US, all that same day. Oregon, Texas, and Ohio. All were quickly reported on by major news outlets, which probably means there were ten more the same day that were far less serious...)

But this train disaster was a big deal by any account. And I, some random guy 4,000km away and in another country, encountered the story when it first broke and via the mainstream media. There, right at the outset, it was clear this wasn’t a couple of train cars carrying gravel and boxes of Cornflakes that jumped the tracks but some fifty cars carrying highly toxic materials that were quickly on fire and busy exploding. It was just the highly visual and dramatic sort of stuff every newsroom lives for.

More than that, after the initial event and reporting, the drama only kept coming. There was an emergency evacuation, someone decided it was a good idea to just burn the whole thing up in a "controlled explosion", a fire that wouldn’t go out, a reporter arrested, and much more… And coverage of all this followed closely along.

A PUBLIC RESPONSE

And then it happened. More than a week after the initial events of February 3rd, and after broad coverage from local, regional, national, and international media, social media began overflowing with posts about how the incident and its impacts are being "systematically ignored by the media."

Tweets from more than a week after the event

What seems crucial to me is that this phenomenon as a whole feels organic and non-partisan. Some of these posts point to the failings of the current administration and others to the former, for example. Some people are entirely focussed on the ecological and others care only about the social and human costs. Still others focus on a range of economic concerns. More common than taking a clear stance or pointing blame are those that just declare no one (but them, presumably) is paying attention.

And what is really funny about this, to me at least, is that if this observation was accurate, and no media was covering it at all, it would still appear that just about everyone outside of the world's newsrooms are on the case, drawing much attention, bearing witness, and documenting the tragedy from every possible angle and adding context and commentary, too. So I'm not sure where the demand for the news that everyone seems to despise is coming from or how it is justified, however...

Regardless, maybe it was myself who was in some weird news media and social bubble. Was I somehow blind to the cover-up and how concealed this matter was in the US? It’s certainly plausible that my persistent internet searchings on environmental issues and things of this sort has algorithmically trained all my news channels to highlight stories just like this for me. But is it actually impossible, as some claim, or merely difficult to find reporting on this? Did this seemingly catastrophic event make it onto no one’s evening news nor the landing page of the local gazette, even? Well, we can go look.

THE NEWS

To start, the derailment took place on February 3rd, at 8:55pm. When I search “Ohio train derailment” and narrow that search only to articles posted on the 3rd, I get pieces from major media outlets at all levels. NBC ran with a report titled “Ohio town under evacuation order after train derails, chemical burns.” The text immediately following reads “Residents within 1 mile of the scene in eastern Ohio were ordered to stay away. Officials said Saturday that the burning chemical was vinyl chloride.” Then they have a video, right at the top of the page, highlighting language from the National Cancer Center “Vinyl chloride: Highly flammable gas, associated with an increased risk of cancer.” The same was being reported by most of NBC's smaller local affiliate stations in towns all over the country.

And that was true as well for countless local ABC, CBS, and Fox affiliates across the US. Despite being an event that just took place and happened on a Friday night after the evening news, it seems this story was still blasted out to every home in America via all major media outlets. And, of course, none of this tracks what was happening with personal posts, photos, and videos on Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media. Doubtless locals were sharing clips of what they were seeing and up to on their Facebook pages and TikTok accounts the whole time, too. Right?

The following day, on the 4th, really just hours after the initial events, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, Washington Post, and seemingly every other news outlet had stories. Jacobin, Bloomberg, and Time Magazine were even on the case. At the same time, The Guardian in the UK was reporting “Blaze from 50-car train derailment in Ohio still burning”. “Hazardous materials being carried on freight train leads to evacuation order and state of emergency.” CTV Canada, and La Presse, ABC Australia, Deutsche Welle, The Indian Express, The Straits Times, and The Epoch Times, Al Jazeera, and Al Arabiya and the whole damn global mediasphere was offering up this story to their listeners and readers. So, in light of all the above, it’s very hard to see how every American and billions of people across the planet weren't exposed to this story immediately after it took place.

Top articles from major news outlets in the US and around the globe less than 24rs after the initial event

But what about the content of these stories? Were they just noting that it happened or were they giving us critical details? Well, every one of them was using language such as: very dangerous, one-mile evacuation zone, shelter-in-place orders, state of emergency, fire, explosions, heavy smoke, hazardous chemicals, toxic materials, flammables, combustibles, environmental risk, vinyl chloride, health impacts, pollution, air quality, chemicals detected in streams, discoloration of drinking water… And all of this came within hours, not days or weeks, of the derailment and explosion.

And, of course, the reporting didn’t stop there. As more details came to light most of these same newsrooms and networks, independent reporters and citizen journalists gave us endless stories, daily or every other day, about: the evacuation being lifted; that there were far more chemicals to be concerned about than just vinyl chloride; that the air and water was certainly polluted; animals were found sick or dead (from fish in the local creek to a woman’s chickens and a man’s foxes); lobbying for deregulation may have played a part in the accident; that the company must be held to account, and more. And the drama continues to unfold — all across every newspaper, magazine, radio station, television news, and web service you know. It continues today.

So, by any accounting, the volume and variety of media we have on this event, just from mainstream sources alone, is far closer to staggering and overwhelming than paltry. To look at all this and arrive at the assessment that what we have is a blackout is, well, ...I don't even have language for that. Confusing? Dumb? Outlandish? Propaganda?

What then is missing from these news articles? And what am I, and what are these people suggesting this is not being seen, missing? What is the unintended, emergent property generating this phenomenon? Is that not it at all? Is it just folks seeing an emergency and feeling that the response is far too slow and minimal for the modern era? What?