Getting Into Google and Yahoo News

This larger, wider group of casualties does receive, at times, media coverage, as well as periodic and in-depth special reports, and we react to these casualties with the same empathy, concern and sorrow as the more often reported types of tragedy. But clearly, media reporting of deaths from this latter group of causes, deaths from cancer, or strokes, or elderly falls, or suicides, that reporting runs lower overall, and much lower on a per death basis, than the reporting garnered by the headline incidents mentioned earlier -- the killings by terrorists, the murders from street violence, the deaths in combat, the fatalities of a mass shooting, the victims of plane crasheshis does not seek to assail or denigrate or criticize the important and critical reporting of the tragic and deadly incidents the media does cover, nor does this argue for any less coverage of terrorist attacks, or natural disasters, or casualties among our armed forces and first responders. This coverage pays respect and reverence to the unfortunate and in too many cases innocent and unsuspecting victims. And the coverage stirs us to action -- to strengthen our defense against terror, to donate, to volunteer, to improve safety, to hold our government accountable, to demand better actions of our corporations, to improve our disaster preparations, to change our habits, or to simply learn and understand.

To start, as a fairly obvious point, being newsworthy implies just that, being new, sometimes absolutely new, like a new discovery, but more often new, different, unusual, referenced against the normal course of events. The incident must rise above the immense background of innumerable events occurring normally, every day, multiple times a day, in multiple locations onsider, for example, trees. Lumber companies harvest, hopefully in an environmentally News sound way, millions of trees a year -- nothing special, not often reported. However, when one of those harvested trees will serve as the centerpiece of the holiday display say in Washington DC's Ellipse, that singular tree will, very likely, merit media attention. Thus, similarly, in terms of the tragic, reporting goes not to the millions of acres of forests where trees grow, uneventfully, a bit each day, but rather to those several thousand acres that erupt into deadly and destructive forest fires.

What other key attribute elicits strong reporting? Human poignancy. The upstanding cab driver who works tirelessly to return a priceless violin left in the taxi, such an incident draws news attention. The beauty of the Cherry Blossoms, again in Washington, DC, and again to use another example involving trees, strikes us with charm and grandeur, and as such can become a photo or video feature in the medi the tragic side, the poignancy runs darker -- incidents of appalling injustice, or terrifying vulnerability, or mystifying origin. Terrorism rivets us on all these dimensions. We cringe at unfairness heaped upon the innocent victims and the barbaric psyche of the slayer; we find ourselves feeling no place lies ouside the reach of such acts; and we can not relate or understand how or why a person could justify their killing actions.