The Accidental Reality

On Wednesday, major league baseball player Cory Lidle accidentally flew into a residential high rise in downtown Manhattan. The news media echoed the coverage of the events that brought down the World Trade towers in 2001 in its analysis and minute by minute coverage. However, the attention the Lidle accident got in the television news media in Canada was different from that in the US. Around 6pm, about 4 hours after the accident, Wolf Blitzer stood in his Situation Room on CNN examining different angles as to why Lidle's plane flew into a building. The television screens surrounding him showed different aerial shots, close-ups, maps etc. When I flipped to CBC Newsworld, I thought I was going to see the same coverage from a Canadian perspective. To my surprise, the CBC kept to its regular programming, and as usual at 5pm, aired Politics with Don Newman, who was discussing something to do with the Liberal Leadership campaign. That alone made me wonder what defines an accident as significant. A small airplane flying into a residential high rise in the core of a city is pretty significant in that it affects thousands in the immediate area, and in general, the incident is unusual. The passenger jets flying into the World Trade towers fits the same criteria, however unlike a residential high rise, the World Trade towers are symbolic of the American psyche - money and capitalism.

The next question I thought was what deems the accident significant enough to "take over" CNN's national programming? The incident wasn't significant enough for the CBC to do the same.