Journalists are always trying to make new sound relevant to viewers/readers, often by finding a local angle. My favourite example being a New York newspaper that reported the Bolshevik revolution with the headline, "Bronx Man Leads Russian Revolution." (referring to Leon Trotsky, who briefly lived in the Bronx)
But the way the local emphasis often emerges is through reporting local victims of a disaster. It's not, "100 people were killed in a plane crash," it's, "100 people - including 3 Canadians - were killed in a plane crash," as though that will make us care so much more.
The CBC went overboard this week in trying to report on the recent bridge collapse in Washington (state).
(Just as an aside: I love how the BBC article I linked to above has the headline, "US road bridge collapse 'caused by lorry'". Who could the headline possibly be quoting? Anyone involved with the story wouldn't use the word, "lorry.")
Anyway, the CBC reported the bridge collapse as severing vital link between Canada and the U.S. So I thought, I hadn't realized this bridge was near the border. Turns out it was about 80km away from the border. Is that really close enough that we want to look at it as hurting us? Most of us live within 80km of the U.S. border, so by that standard Americans could report pretty much anything that happens here as being about them. Okay, I guess they already do that. Except for the reporting on us part.
The extra irony is that the "lorry" that caused the collapse was Canadian. So if we wanted to make the story all about us, that's the easiest way to do it, cast us as the perpetrator, not the victims.
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