Great post here in London Underground Tube Diary - Going Underground's Blog about yesterday's Central Line "accident", which was being repeatedly announced in doom-laden tomes as I made my way home yesterday evening.
In a post entitled "regular reader on derailed tube", one of Annie Mole's readers wrote: "Hi Annie. I was on the train that derailed at 40mph between Mile End and Bethnal Green yesterday morning - only one person had a sprained ankle to show for it on the whole train apparently and no one was scared although a bit shaken up (Dunkirk spirit and all that)."
And the newspaper headline? "Commuters thought it was another 7/7" (72 pt, natch).
From the comments to Annie's post:
---BBC report that "Safety checks are under way on the Tube's storage facilities after a dislodged roll of tarpaulin landed on the tracks, causing the derailment."
--It really winds me up when newspapers (i.e., people) do this - invoke 7/7 at the drop of a hat. Scary though it must have been for the passengers, this was NOTHING like 7/7, where the train literally was blown apart.
This is what we do in the news business: Blow things out of all proportion. We used to joke about wheeling out the "proportion blower" whenever any big story would break. The reasoning, in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, was that if we didn't do it, somebody else would.
When you actually live someplace that's within 100 miles of a national story, it's kind of amusing when friends and loved ones asking if you're all right. That's when you realize that exaggerating the importance of prosaic events really does create a different reality for those not at the scene. That's probably not quite as harmless as I used to think it was.
Posted by: Dave Knadler | 07 July 2007 at 05:06
That's just one more example of how 9/11 (Did I say that? I mean 7/7, of course) has changed our lives forever. By "our," of course, I mean those of us in the news business.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
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Posted by: Peter | 07 July 2007 at 06:59
Just noticed I wrote "tomes" instead of "tones". Was that a typo or a freudian typo? If the latter, what was I thinking of?
Posted by: Maxine | 11 July 2007 at 22:20