Media Navel Gaze: April 22, 2013
The Week Unpeeled
An amazingly busy and heavy news week filled with tragic headlines, with global focus on the Boston Marathon bombings and a closely watched manhunt (one of the biggest in US history) that ended in the arrest of a 19-year college student, who with his brother killed in a police firefight, allegedly were responsible for the two homemade bombs at the finish line of the famous race. The live proceedings of the dragnet become reality TV or online viewing with the most recent coverage on why this happened and how it could have been prevented. (UK coverage over the weekend focused on the “what” of Chechnyan ties and the “why” of photos of Bostonians celebrating the capture for such a tragic story.) The vast amount of civilian coverage of the bombing from smartphones made spectators at the race news “capturerers,” not really witnessed at this intensity. London marathoners on Sunday observed a 30-second moment of silence before the start of their race.
Elsewhere:
- A fertilizer plant in Texas exploded (at the strength of a 2.1-magnitude earthquake), killing as many as 15 people, leveling many homes and injuring up to 180;
- An Elvis impersonator was charged in sending ricin-tainted letter to the president and others;
- The Senate rejected new restrictions on firearms;
- Al Neuharth, the media mogul who ran Gannett Company and created USA Today, died;
- Blackstone ended its bid for Dell with ownership still in pursuit;
- The Dow also suffered, ending down 317 points for the week, or 2.1 percent, to close at 14547;
- A small Brooklyn news outlet, InsideClimate News, which was founded just six years ago and funded by charitable foundations and readers, won a Pulitzer for national reporting, along with four from The New York Times, one from The Wall Street Journal and two from The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, among others; and
- The Sunday Times published the Richest in Britain list with the top seven coming from outside the UK, many from Russia, highlighting the “lure of Britain to a footloose global elite”; top spot goes to Alisher Usmanov, part owner of Arsenal football club.
