ailuropoda melanoleuca torontonensis wrote:

today is the anniversary (1937) of the destruction of the *Hindenberg*
by fire.



What's most remarkable about this explosion and fire is that it is probably
the first documented case of news media hype for the sake of hype.

While it's true that it was a terrible loss of 35 lives, there are also a few
things to note:

(1) The story wasn't done live. It was recorded on a wire recorder and the
commentator, Herb Morrison, asks a couple times of his assistant, "Get this,
Charlie, get this, Charlie" to make sure he was getting a recording.

(2) It was not "one of the worst catastrophes in the world," either.

(3) Though 36 people died, it was not the heaviest loss of life during the
decade, nor even the heaviest loss of life due to airship disasters. The
U.S.S. Akron disater 4 years earlier took more than twice as many lives. What
made it remarkable was that it was recorded for posterity.

The Hindenberg disaster should be a lesson to all of us that what is on the
news is not the sum total of what's happened in the world that day. Another
example is the quake of 1989. It looked like San Francisco was being burnt to
a crisp, and yet it was only a couple buildings fed by a gas line that nobody
knew how to turn off. The shots were shown over and over again because ABC
happened to have a helicopter in the sky for World Series coverage. Far more
loss of life and destruction happened in communties such as Santa Cruz,
Watsonville, and Oakland that day.