THE BRIDGE

The collapse of the freeway bridge in Minneapolis is a case study in how the mass media senationalize and distort information. Of course everyone regrets the loss of life, and this criticism is directed specifically at cable news (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) and not intended in any way to disparage victims of this terrible engineering failure. That being said, I've heard enough.

Breaking news of the collapse lit up the cable news tree from top to bottom. It was so big O'Reilly was bumped. Fox stayed with the story literally all night. What really raised questions for me was the almost instantaneous reaction by Homeland Security downplaying the possibility of terrorist involvement. How can they be so sure so fast? That kind of makes one wonder what kind of program they're running over there.

Now the criticism: ENOUGH! I think several days of nonstop coverage is quite sufficient. It is also clear that we need a few ground rules for the use of terms like accident, tragedy, and disaster. An accident is when there's a pileup on the freeway. A bridge collapse is no accident: gravity is a constant, and the rest falls on the heads of the humans building and maintaining. A tragedy is when death befalls a promising individual or small group, or a historical building falls tothe wrecking ball. The collapse of a bridge is horrific, but not a tragedy: it fell all on its own, without a bright future. A disaster is a massive tornado, or a volcano, or a tsunami. Perhaps the rules governing certain terms implies a body count, as primitive as that seems. Every five seconds the cable talking heads grew solemn and you knew "tragedy" or "disaster" were coming. Ridiculous. Now the death toll appears to be much smaller than originally thought, fortunately.

Speculation about every aspect of the collapse, always preceded by a declaration admitting uninformed guessing, began immediately. Anyone who ever drove across a bridge became an instant expert. It should be weeks or perhaps months before anyone knows anything about causation. That is not a conclusion any expert or panel of experts can satisfactorily reach overnight. The wild guessing just made me reach for the remote. Finally I had to flee to the web to get any war news at all.

It took until today for the media to let me know my home state of Ohio has nearly 200 bridges of the type that collapsed, more than any other state. Very timely.

One final item: The fellow on the schoolbus who kicked open the emergency door and helped the kids get out is a good man, but not a hero. He just happened to be there. If he's a hero, then so is the doorman at a hotel.

JINGOCON