How long to get over the tragic death of 66 people? 4 days, according to the news

When Egyptair Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo went missing on Thursday during its flight over the Mediterranean, all news stations covered the event all day long. No stone was left unturned, multiple accusations were made, but no one cause of the crash into the ocean could be determined so far.

What’s problematic in my eyes is not the repeating coverage of the same few facts over and over again, but how fast the story was replaced by other important events such as Obama’s Visit to Hanoi, Wall Street’s great start into the week and others. Even Focus Online’s News ticker stopped ticking on sunday at 10 am.

I use Google news, because it gives me the headlines of all the news media I want. Therefore, I can gain a fairly good overview over what is on the news today. And, so far, not that much has been said about MS804. Sure, news values such as frequency, negativity, continuity and others all lead towards less coverage of the same story over time, but it’s only been four days since all those people died. If they were your relatives or loved ones, you wouldn’t stop mourning their dead after four days, saying ‘oh well, Obama’s visit to Hanoi is more important right now’, would you? With all respect to the important work that reporters and news channels do, but I think four days of mourning is a little too soon to skip over to the next topic.

Don’t forget those 66 souls. Yet.