How Cable News Will Inevitably Politicize the Surfside building tragedy
25th June 2021
Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching — and because video is available just by pointing the camera. Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information to fill it with, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy.
To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first. Except for seeing what the building looked like and watching the interviews (if you like that sort of thing), the TV coverage is a waste of time.