Minnesota Disaster One Of The Top Stories Of The Year

It was late afternoon on Friday Aug.3—less than 48 hours after the I-35W Bridge had collapsed into the Mississippi River—and CNN’s “Situation Room” was in full battle mode. Captions like “Happening Now” and “Breaking News Alert” filled the screen with a sense of urgency.

At the site of the Minneapolis catastrophe, correspondent Brian Todd described a city “cut in half” as recovery workers go about their “slow” and “very treacherous” work. “Divers carry out the grim tasks of searching for bodies and sunken cars in the Mississippi River,” he reported.

Also on scene, correspondent Mary Snow relayed the story of Good Samaritan/hero Greg Bernstein, who helped tend to several severely injured victims immediately after the accident. “I could see the guy…who was crushed,” Bernstein recalled. “A truck landed on top of his car…And he was yelling, he was saying he couldn’t breathe.”

By now, three days into the event, the media was taking the narrative of the bridge collapse in several directions. The death and trauma in Minnesota were interwoven with the broader issue of U.S. infrastructure safety. Anchor Wolf Blitzer announced that as of last December, there were 760 bridges in the U.S. with a design similar to the one in Minneapolis. “Two hundred and sixty-four of them,” he intoned, “are considered structurally deficient.”

Blitzer later switched to a reporter at a television station in Tequesta, Florida. The bridge in that community has been labeled structurally deficient and a cracked center span recently had to be replaced. Since the Minnesota disaster, the reporter stated, citizens were “calling the mayor’s office…They are concerned about the safety of the Tequesta Bridge here…The mayor assures people here there’s no need to panic.”

Meanwhile, Jack Cafferty, the “Situation Room’s” designated skeptical curmudgeon, came up with the day’s email question for CNN viewers. “How confident are you if officials say that a bridge is in very little danger of collapsing?”

Over at the Fox News Channel, afternoon business anchor Neil Cavuto was also focusing on the bridge tragedy.

“I guess what hits most folks is the randomness of it all,” he observed. “A bridge, taken routinely by thousands every day, becomes a death trap for a few, on one day — just like that.” Sad funereal music accompanied a video collage of scenes of injury, damage and rescue at the bridge.

The rush-hour collapse Aug. 1 of the I-35W Bridge—which thus far has claimed five lives and left eight others missing— shoved most other news to second status last week.

According to PEJ’s News Coverage Index for July 29-Aug. 3, the bridge disaster filled 25% of the newshole of TV and radio airtime and print and online space, making by far the biggest story of the week. It was the top story in every sector of the media and was a dominant TV news story, accounting for 29% of last week’s broadcast network coverage. That was particularly true on cable, where it filled 43% of the airtime.

That level of attention made the bridge collapse the fourth-biggest event of 2007. The top story was the Virginia Tech shooting rampage, which filled 51% of the newshole for the week of April 15-20.

The second biggest story was the Iraq policy debate, which accounted for 34% of all coverage in the week of Jan 7-12 when President Bush announced his “surge” strategy. The third-biggest story was the firing of talk host Don Imus which filled 26% of the newshole in the week of April 8-13.

Yet those numbers probably undercount the intensity of the coverage, as the week only includes three days of news about the bridge collapse—Aug. 1 through Aug 3. In that more compressed time frame, the story accounted for 41% of the overall news coverage, consuming 48% of the network news airtime and 69% of the cable newshole.

No other subject came close last week. The 2008 presidential campaign was the second-biggest story at 8%, followed by the events inside Iraq (5%), the Iraq policy debate (3%) and Rupert Murdoch’s controversial $5 billion acquisition of Dow Jones, and its flagship paper, The Wall Street Journal (3%). The health scare that struck Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts (3%) was the sixth story. The continued probe into beleaguered Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was seventh-biggest, also at 2%.

With the probable final death toll now expected to be about dozen lives, the Minnesota disaster will not come close to matching the cost or casualty count of an event like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. Yet it seemed to strike a powerful chord with both media and the public. Part of that may well have been the images of cars tossed around like toys. Part of it may have been the sense that it could have happened to anyone anywhere—the “there but by the grace of God” sentiment uttered by Cavuto. Another factor is the fact that it may suggest a broader issue, the safety of U.S. road infrastructure. Still another element to the story was the mystery of whether lives might still be saved, always a powerful force in news.

The story may also have mined a deeper concern embedded in the national psyche—and one touched on in some of the coverage—the sense that America’s know-how, confidence, and invincibility are eroding in this era of 9/11 and Katrina. As John McQuaid wrote in a Washington Post column headlined “The Can’t Do Nation,” the U.S. “seems to have become the superpower that can’t tie its own shoelaces….Its bridges shouldn’t fall down.”

So many subtexts can turn an event into a national dialogue.

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