Oct 12, 2006 
I check the blog aggregating site Memeorandum at least once a day, because it tells me at-a-glance what most people are blogging about. And as many have noticed, righties and lefties tend to comment on different stories.
Most of the time, the reason for this is obvious. “Our” side chases stories that make “them” look bad; “they” go after stories that make “us” look bad. The occasional “hooray for us” swarm is usually followed closely by a posse of “so what?” posts.
But what about this: Yesterday most of the Right Blogosphere reported frantically on the plane accident in Manhattan that killed a New York Yankees pitcher. Several righties “live blogged” what they saw on television. The Left mostly left it alone, except to comment on what the righties were up to.
I didn’t blog about it because I do political and social commentary here, and there was neither a political nor social angle to the accident. It was off topic, as far as I was concerned. I probably would have blogged about it had I been an eyewitness, but I wasn’t. I don’t know anything more than what was reported on television yesterday.
Tom Tomorrow snarked at the righties: “No one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV.” Allahpundit responded,
True, but no one’s going to win a blog Pulitzer anyway. And it does come in handy for the 90% of the readership that are at work and looking for information.
But why was this “information” so vital that people couldn’t wait to hear about until they got home? A political development likely to impact the elections or the government or otherwise have widespread consequences is one thing. But a small plane accident? I could sorta kinda see commenting on the accident before it was determined it was an accident and not terrorism, but a number of righties continued to treat it as a Big National Bleeping Deal story long after they knew it was an accident.
For that matter, I was surprised Chris Matthews spent the entire hour of the 5:00 Hardball on the plane accident. New York local news was all over it, which is understandable, as the accident was a big local story. And since a nationally known sports figure died, it was worth some time on national news. But an entire hour of Hardball? Of course, cable news is not exactly famous for perspective, given the absurd amount of attention given to John Karr a few weeks ago.
But it gets worse — apparently, for some reason, the accident was a global story. Tim Footman in the UK comments:
A small aircraft has crashed into a building in Manhattan. Obviously, we are gripped by the news: the attacks five years ago are still seared in our minds, and the memory is made more grim by the knowledge that the whole thing was a beginning, not an end. The outside chance that such an event might be repeated grabs the attention of media providers around the globe.
But soon, it becomes clear that, although the precise details are yet to emerge, it wasn’t a terrorist attack. There’s added flavour from the fact that one of the men on the aeroplane was a baseball player with the New York Yankees, but that’s as far as the story looks likely to run: a tragedy for the people directly involved and their friends and families; a shock for local residents. Please move along, there’s nothing to see here.
Except, apparently, there is. I quite understand why the initial reports flashed around the planet – no editor would want to miss the possibility of 9/11 redux. But when we realised that it was a false alarm, surely it became little more than a footnote.
Not according to the BBC website, which was still making it their lead story, hours after it became clear that Osama was nowhere in sight. Ditto the Daily Telegraph site. The Guardian, Times and Independent kept it as second or third lead. Further afield, the story led on the sites of Le Monde, La Repubblica, Süddeutsche-Zeitung, El País, the Times of India, Yomiuri Shimbun and many more.
Mr. Footman speculates that the story got international attention because it happened in New York.
It seems that we’ve exchanged the Little Englander insularity of the men in dicky-bows for a weird loss of perspective, in which the lives and deaths of Americans take precedence over all else. It’s a sort of vicarious insularity, something akin to the morbid fascination some people feel for the celebrities in Heat magazine, to the exclusion of news that may actually affect their own lives. Just as medieval scholars created maps that placed Jerusalem at the centre, the world’s media has made Manhattan the capital of the planet.
Maybe, but that doesn’t explain rightie bloggers, who tend to think of New York City as an alien corruption defacing the edge of the beloved Homeland. Maybe, deep down inside, they hope one plane crash in Manhattan is the beginning of a trend. Otherwise — WTF?
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