More people died due to the explosion at the fertilizer plant. More property was destroyed by the explosion and based on the evidence so far it was preventable if the people in charge or regulators had decided to do something. However all we hear about in the news is the Boston bombing yet the guys who let this plant blow up are responsible for for a lot more death and destruction. The media doesn't even seem to care about the story in Texas.
I see far more coverage of the West tragedy on local news than about Boston. As I would expect...not sure why you are surprised.
One is a local tragic explosion and one is an attack by terrorists with links to international groups and Muslim extremism. Quick: You're a national news channel content director. Pick which story will have most appeal to the most people nationally. Go.
More to the story in Boston. Catching the bombers, how it reflects the ongoing <s>War on Terror</s> Overseas Contingency Operation, was in the middle of a massive media market.
One you can blame foreigners the other You would have to blame a Corporation We never like to blame Corporations and hold them accountable. Rocket River Corporations are people. . . well. that is until they kill someone. .
really? my sense is the current administration and the democratic party exhibit no compunction in blaming corporations for any manner of societal ills.
I recently heard of an experiment in which someon receives electrical shocks 5 times when someone in another room presses a button; half are told the other person doesn't know he's causing pain while the half is told he does know. The group who thinks the guy doesn't know feels less pain with successive shocks where the group who thinks he does know feels the pain as the same every time. When we feel like someone is trying to hurt us on purpose, it's enraging. When we know the perp didn't realize, we can tolerate it better. Even if it was negligence, we don't think the plant operator or the regulators blew that thing up on purpose.
I think it should go beyond negligence when you state there is fire or explosion risk when you are storing ammonium nitrate. If you see that as an inspector or if you fill that out it sounds like you are committing fraud.
Terrorism is not just murder. It is an attack on the authority of the state and the nation in the name of some form of political ideology. That is why it is more problematic than the Waco incident.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing. I'm saying that even with gross negligence, even if they were purposely evading regulation-enforcement and even if more egregious behavior comes to light later (like bribery), they still weren't trying to blow it up and hurt people. And, psychologically, people take it worse when you try to hurt them than when their injury is a mere byproduct of your dumbassery.
Intent and known vs. unknown risks are the key factors here. Don't forget that industrial entities do provide a net benefit to society and will be given the benefit of the doubt.
(I'm not saying these things are equivalent.) One of the first "political" things I was aware of was my father complaining that people were still making a big deal of the Kent State shootings, but nobody was talking about the Marshall football team airplane crash. At some level in my 9 year-old brain, I knew the comparison Dad was making was a false one. This kind of reminds me of that. Added to what others have said, Boston took place in the middle of a national athletic event so you even had ESPN doing a bunch of (really good, I thought) reporting on the bombing, which drove interest.
It is easier to show causation and create a story when you have a couple of perps running around killing people based on an extreme ideology. It is harder to make a story when its just willfull negligence run amok. And as justtxyank explained, because you can make more money with the first narrative, we hear more about it. If Americans cared about corporate malfeasance over terrorism, we'd hear more about the second narrative. Most Americans don't care about corporate malfeasance because it is too difficult to understand that a complex system can result in otherwise reasonable people doing things that create unreasonable results. It's way to easier to understand the idea of a bad person than a system that is neither bad nor good but produces results all across the spectrum. It is sort of poetic that the force that resulted in greater coverage of the Boston bombing over the tragedy in Texas is the same force that leaves us with the undesirable deaths of those people living in West, Texas.
Now, if I can argue the other side today, people should be a lot more interested in the West story than the Boston bombing story. That terror attack is a rare event and we've already committed a lot of resources to stopping similar future events. The Boston attack is one that got through. We've also committed resources to stopping fertilizer plant explosions. But, probably not as much. And, there are a lot more stockpiles of explosive material out there with lax safety regimens than there are terrorists. And, of course, there is an intersection of explosive stockpiles and terrorists that can addressed with better safety regimens on the stockpiles. It won't stop terrorists from blowing things up generally but would make it less likely they blow up fertilizer plants in the middle of town. The story may be more boring because it revolves around procedure and regulation, but the damage*probabality is higher.
A very apt comparison, rimrocker. For those of us with a vivid memory of Kent State, and who also remember the horrible Marshall crash, it was not at all about the size of the death toll, or the relative impact on the families. That's going to be the worst moment a parent experiences regardless, and doesn't differ from losing a child in a car crash, not to them. In a national and world context, they simply don't compare. I'm certainly following the West tragedy, but the nation and the world care far more about Boston. That's just how it is. Context is everything, as is timing. West would have gotten, and would continue to receive, far more coverage if Boston hadn't occurred when it did.
