Broken News

If a tree fell in a forest and there wasn't a twenty-four hour cable news network there to cover it, would it really have happened?
This morning I took a brief tour of morning television before jumping into my day and was greeted by CNN's Headline News. They had a couple of major events that they were covering, so I sat, transfixed, waiting to be told what they were at the top of the hour. Returning from the briefest of commercial breaks, I was given lots of different vantage points of the devastation brought about by a tractor trailer ramming into a train station in Chicago. Although this occurred during last night's rush hour, there were still plenty of eyewitness accounts and amateur video to be shown. Two people lost their lives and twenty-one more were injured. The truck driver was taken to a hospital, and the speculation about what caused this mess continued to swirl. That speculation should keep the story in heavy rotation until a cause (terrorists?) can be determined.
The next story was about a shark attack at a San Diego beach. A triathlete was killed Friday morning, and the news impact was centered more on the fact that public beaches were being closed in San Diego as a precaution. Never mind that this was the first shark attack fatality in in San Diego County since 1994, and prior to that, the last known fatal attack in the area was in 1959. Details on the shark's religious or political affiliations, or if the shark had been drinking at the time of the attack.
Don't get me wrong, I believe the loss of any life is a tragedy, but I began to wonder why we don't see more video of trucks pulling safely into loading docks or people going into the water where no man-eating predators had recently been sighted. And we know the answer: Death is news, and death is a tragedy, therefore news is a tragedy. Especially when you have to fill twenty-four hours with it.