Let’s be fair…

The media chases clicks and attention.

News reading Americans rather read about “Is it China or aliens?”, the war in Ukraine, earthquake in Middle East and the Super Bowl than small-town Ohio.

The media chases money, and clicks and attention work for that, but so does other stuff, eg, bribery.

In what way is a fiery train derailment and cows dropping dead all over the region not a good story for clicks and attention? I guess the balloon feels a bit more whimsical but it feels like the more boring story.

In this instance, the simplest explanation really does seem to be financial conflict of interest.

The balloon story is less about the balloon itself and more about the wider conflict between china and US.

”China conducts surveillance on US” is still not particularly exciting or novel news either way. Train derailment poisons an entire town is definitely the more eye-catching headline.

>”China conducts surveillance on US” is still not particularly exciting or novel news either way

1. ”China conducts surveillance on US” gets plenty of clicks/attention. Just look at tiktok, and before that huawei/ZTE.

2. In this case specifically it's not just "China conducts surveillance on US", it's also arguably violating the territorial integrity of the US. For americans that's strikes much closer to home than shadowy hackers hacking from china.

> ”China conducts surveillance on US” gets plenty of clicks/attention.

Does it? As far as I can tell, the “TikTok spies on people” stories have all been met with “yeah, so does Facebook”. This is across pretty much the entire political spectrum. It seems to me that only the political/media class actually find it significant.

While it’s obviously too early to have non-anecdotal data on this, my instincts tell me very few people actually care or find it surprising that China “violated the territorial integrity of the U.S.” as if we’re not constantly flying drones over other world powers. It’s just standard operating procedure at this point.

The balloon story is being propped up by UFO conspiracy theorists and let's not pretend it's anything but that. They are absolutely going nuts over every "unknown object" being shot down. Every single mention on it here on HN is filled with people talking about it.

They gonna care when the crops and livestock we depend on from that area quit producing. And prices go up even more. This was insanely horrid the toll it is going to take on that region and the Country.

> The Chinese balloons weren’t in a large metropolitan area.

Do we know that? We mainly just know they weren’t shot down over one.

I mean, no we are not aware of a connection to any metropolitan area. Which is the point. If the lack of derailment coverage was just pro-metropolitan bias you wouldn’t expect Billings, MT to be receiving the entire attention of the media right now.

These train derailings have been happening, which is my point. It took a particularly bad crash for it to get this level of attention.

I’m not sure this is relevant to the original discussion. Pro-metropolitan bias doesn’t explain the difference between how the 2 stories are being treated. Media’s class-alignment with railroad execs and politicians responsible for the disaster is a more reasonable explanation.

I would say they're equally plausible. It's kind of gross that folks are so ready to deny that there's an over focus on metropolitan issues (I say that as someone that lives in a metro and has lived in a pretty rural area before). The immediate dismissal from folks does lend more credence to the idea that it's a societal bias.

I mean, I'm not denying that there's a metropolitan bias in the media, just that it doesn't explain why 2 stories that both happened in relatively rural locations got reported on differently.