Taxes, Victims, and News Envy

35W among year’s biggest stories: The 35W collapse is 2007′s fourth biggest news stories, dominating all media segments last week, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. From July 29 through Aug. 3 the story got less coverage than only the Virginia Tech shootings, the Don Imus story, and the Iraq policy debate. But the ranking might be higher when considering the collapse dominated news for only part of the week: “In that more compressed time frame, the story accounted for 41% of the overall news coverage, consuming 48% of the network news airtime and 69% of the cable newshole.” PEJ asks why, posing that perhaps the narrative taps into a deep collective fear — “that America’s know-how, confidence, and invincibility are eroding in this era of 9/11 and Katrina.” It quotes the Washington Post’s John McQuaid, who wrote that the U.S. “seems to have become the superpower that can’t tie its own shoelaces….Its bridges shouldn’t fall down.”

Tax talk: Newt Gingrich, writing at Human Events, also quotes McQuaid’s column, which was entitled “The Can’t-Do Nation.” In calling for a speedy rebuilding of I-35, he equates the suffering of Minnesotans killed, missing, injured and inconvenienced by the disaster with the suffering he believes taxes cause: “[P]eople should not be re-victimized by using this tragedy as an excuse to raise taxes.” Meanwhile, the Star Tribune covers Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s “startling turnaround on a gas tax” with a quick history of gas tax increases — no bump since 1988 — and Pawlenty’s past statements against a tax he once called an “unnecessary and onerous burden” for Minnesotans.

Wareham: Size Matters: MPR’s Bill Wareham seems to have an inferiority complex. In a post called “Strib envy,” he praises the Star Tribune’s coverage of the 35W story and laments he didn’t have the resources to put more reporters on the case. “75 STAFFERS!!! FULLY A QUARTER OF THEIR ENTIRE NEWS STAFF,” he exclaims. “Which only made me groan — I could put our entire news staff on the story and still come up 20 short of the Strib’s 75 on this story.” For the record, Minnesota Monitor devoted all its reporters — fully 100 percent of its entire news staff — to the coverage, without even breaking double digits in terms of staff count.

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