Many Tennesseans have rightly complained that the national press simply hasn't covered the Nashville flood, and Newsweek's Andrew Romano, who quoted the oft-windy "Aunt B.," Betsy Phillips, trying to explain why the national press doesn't seem to give a rat's rear end about the Nashville flood:
In a climate where chatter is constant and ubiquitous, newsworthiness now seems to be determined less by what's most important than by what all those other media outlets are talking about the most. Sheer volume of coverage has become its own qualification for continued coverage. (Witness the Sandra Bullock-Jesse James saga.) In that sense, it's easy to see why the press can't seem to focus on more than one or two disasters at the same time. Everyone is talking about BP and Faisal Shahzad 24/7, the "thinking" goes. So there must not be anything else that's as important to talk about. It's a horrible feedback loop.
Of course, the media is also notorious for its ADD; no story goes on forever. Which brings us to the second reason the Nashville floods never gained much of a foothold in the national conversation: the "narrative" simply wasn't as strong. Because it continually needs to fill the airwaves and the Internet with new content, 1,440 minutes a day, the media can only trade on a story's novelty for a few hours, tops. It is new angles, new characters, and new chapters that keep a story alive for longer. The problem for Nashville was that both the gulf oil spill and the Times Square terror attempt are like the Russian novels of this 24/7 media culture, with all the plot twists and larger themes (energy, environment, terrorism, etc.) required to fuel the blogs and cable shows for weeks on end. What's more, both stories have political hooks, which provide our increasingly politicized press (MSNBC, FOX News, blogs) with grist for the kind of arguments that further extend a story's lifespan (Did Obama respond too slowly? Should we Mirandize terrorists?). The Nashville narrative wasn't compelling enough to break the cycle, so the MSM just continued to blather on about BP and Shahzad.
Allow me to distill all of this chatter into a reality that some of us have known for a long time-that if it doesn't happen in New York, Chicago, Miami or Los Angeles or some other haven of the Left, it isn't news. The reasons for this are not political of course, because most reporters for the major national media outlets live in or near those those places, so for many of them those places are a big part of their personal universe. The things that are important to the people in those locations often seem to color the mainstream media's perception of what should remain news.
The floods in Nashville and Middle Tennessee are the worst natural disaster in the history of this State, and will go down as one of the costliest disasters after Hurricane Katrina in U.S. history, certainly one of the worst non-coastal catastrophes. The historic Tennessee Capitol building and the State archives seem to have survived, but many tens are left dead and thousands more are left with no home to go to and are now dispossessed of much of what they own, their relatively placid lives drowned in the lake that came with the storms last weekend.
One of America's great cultural centers has been devastated, but because Nashville doesn't fit the mainstream media's vision of America, Tennesseans are left as the ones who really care.
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