Toyota Forgotten. Who else has noticed that BP has knocked Toyota completely out of the news?
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Not long ago, pack journalism was all aflutter about Toyota cars that were accelerating uncontrollably, killing people. How long has it been since we've heard so much as one word about that?
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Where is the followup? Were the fixes made by Toyota in recalls completely adequate? Early reports indicated that there might still be problems. But we haven't heard a thing about Toyotas' unintended acceleration for, what? 58 days?
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When will U.S. media stop talking about one thing at a time, and cover all bases, on all days? What has been neglected in this pack-journalism excessive coverage of one story at the expense of all others? During the 58 days of the BP oil spill, there has been horrendous ethnic-cleansing in Kyrgyzstan; massive drug-related murder in Mexico, including the death of a major pop singer; a debt crisis in Greece and Spain threatening the whole Eurozone; protest and violent repression in Thailand; and a hundred other major stories that U.S. English-language networks simply have not covered, either at all or in more than two sentences per story.
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It is useful to be able to get the gist of news in Spanish, because the two U.S. Spanish-language television networks don't have the same small list of stories that U.S. English-language networks cover, all from the Associated Press list of the day's top stories. Thousands of people are being murdered each year in Mexico because of U.S. drug users, all of whom should be prosecuted for terrorism, but U.S. English-language media scarcely touch upon the story. It's also useful to have TV news shows from BBC, France 24, and Deutsche Welle, as we have in the NY Tristate Metropolitan Area, over-air, not just on cable. If you listen only to U.S. English-language news broadcasts, you hear almost nothing about anything but a very few top stories. Right now it's the oil spill and World Cup. Immediately before the World Cup, it was almost all oil spill, all the time. So, whatever did happen with Toyota repairs? I have no idea.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,406 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM