Chicago Fire Gets Little National Coverage

A fire broke out this evening in an older high rise office building in Chicago. At work we watched live feeds of the action. It was very compelling video with flames coming out the windows and people scurrying around not far from the danger (and as it turned out there were many injuries, including some injured firemen).

ABC and the other ‘legacy’ networks were in entertainment programming. This is not the type of story that would have ever caused them to break in. The same is not true for the cable news networks, so I flipped my tuner to Channel 31 and started at MSNBC.

They were in talk programming. I think it was Deborah Norville&#185. On Channel 32, Fox had Hannity and Colmes yapping away. Brooke Shields was with Larry King on CNN, Channel 33.

If any of them covered the fire, it was during headline breaks. I came looking because I wanted to see continuous coverage. I found no coverage.

I know these shows are repeated later in the evening and I assume breaking news makes it much more difficult to run them intact during West Coast prime time. Still, this was the bread and butter of cable news a few years ago.

I’ll bet if any one of them would have broken in, they all would have.

&#185 – I loved Deborah Norville when she was on the radio. She was really charming and quite witty. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched more than 10 consecutive seconds of any of her TV shows. Isn’t it strange how that works?

One thought on “Chicago Fire Gets Little National Coverage”

  1. Hi Geoff!

    I too was surprised about the lack of national coverage of the Chicago fire. I was able to satisfy my curiosity about this dangerous fire by watching live local coverage on the internet. A Chicago station offered live streaming video of the event that was dramatic and compelling to watch.

    I believe this is an indication of how the Internet will let people piece together the news they want to watch instead of what the editor’s choose for broadcast. I think the implications of the internet on the news industry are still not fully understood, but the networks should pay attention to what people want!

    That’s my long-winded view!

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