Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Unfair and Imbalanced

Number 1 headline on this Sunday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Dangerous Cargo on Our Roads, Rails. Of course, if you were expecting a good, balanced view of the sometimes dangerous but necessary transporation of hazardous materials, you should wait for the story in the Atlantic Monthly.

How's the Post-Dispatch do? Well, let's see what we have. Lead:

PALMYRA, Mo. - First came the early morning rap on the door. Then came the coughing, the burning eyes.

In the frantic moments that followed a May 17, 2003, hydrochloric acid spill on nearby U.S. Highway 61, Shorti Garner and her husband, Steve, woke their children and piled them into the family camper to flee their home.

"My kids - in blankets and all - I scooped them up," Shorti Garner said.

A nice play-on-the-emotions anecdote. Anecdotes! Who can deny that it's a frightening situation? I live within a mile of the confluence of two Interstate highways and have train tracks. (Well, I am not a naturalist, but I assume a train left them. They're two big for cat tracks.) I am right in the danger zone for a spill, but I don't worry about it. Why? Because every year four hundred people die from these sorts of accidents. That's not a high number, considering all the stuff travelling about. I would expect more hit and run deaths than deaths from hydrochloric acid exposure from these things leaking.

But that's not the Post-Dispatch's point. Now, they don't delve into issues such as alternate means of transportation, such as dogsleds, homing pigeons, or anything that would be safer. They also don't explain why dangerous chemicals are transported this way, that these chemicals are used to make things people want to buy.

No, I guess the only thing the Post-Dispatch wants to do is panic its stupid readers (whether it thinks its readers are stupid, or whether the people who read it and panic are stupid, I leave to history to decide) and blame the cause of the panic on big greedy corporations who behave irresponsibly at the expense of the little man. Unlike Pulitzer Publishing.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:34 PM