Friday, January 10, 2014

The George Washington Bridge Scandal. . . . Yawn.

The press has been full of news about the scandal surrounding lane closures by the New Jersey Christie administration on the George Washington Bridge.  The story is that some Christie staffers, without his knowledge, arranged for closures to get at the mayor of Ft. Lee New Jersey, I think.

But that's not what I'm writing about.

One of the features of modern broadcasting is that local stories are now portrayed as national ones, particularly if those local stories come from large urban centers.  This is all the more true if the stories come from the New York City area, which is the headquarters of the major network's news branches.

Truth be known, most of the country has next to no concern whatsoever about stories in the NYC area, unless they are truly national in nature. This bridge story isn't.  While the press is busy talking about it, I suspect that once you hit the Midwest, people are yawning and going on to something else.  That is almost certainly the case here.

We get it that administration staffers shouldn't be doing stuff like this, but we don't know anything about the George Washington Bridge, and frankly we aren't really interested in it.  Is there nothing else going on?

And if this story deserves national attention, does the Cindy Hill hearings in Cheyenne deserve them?  I doubt New Yorkers are getting daily updates on that.

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