I learned about the meteor hitting Russia when ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd led his talk show program with it on Friday. His own recalling of how he found out was interesting: up early, watching CNN, he noticed the news crawl that read: Meteor Hits Russia. He was shocked, stunned, not simply that it happened, but that it was not getting more coverage in the first few hours of the event's happening.
Had this been near a major city, this would be the only story you'd see on CNN, especially a major American one. But there it is out in Siberia, and so it becomes one of many different news stories for the American media (though it would make the front page of pretty much every paper in the States).
Cowherd made another great point about the story. Here's an unscheduled event, a serious near-disaster, catching scientists and locals off guard, and yet even though it's in the middle of Siberia (actually, the sonic boom created by the meteor's explosion was in Western Siberia, near Kazakhstan, but you know what I mean) people managed to shoot video and upload it to YouTube. (Various security cameras also caught the explosion "on tape.") But when a guy claims to have seen a UFO, it's always some crappy, grainy footage. And it's only one guy, "in Cancun, nine vodka tonics in at Senor Froggy's on the back deck."
Pretty much any major event -- and certainly far too many minor ones -- are out there on video. In this increasingly interconnected world, it's impossible for something as big as an alien spaceship near our planet to be observed by only one guy. The coverup is too massive. The Chinese government couldn't stop the public from finding out how series and widespread the SARS virus was; you think that if the aliens were arriving on spaceships today the US government could really keep it hushed up? (Besides, if aliens were interested in intelligent life on earth, why would they seek out representatives of our government?)
Of course, after this short segment, Cowherd went back to talking about Lebron James and how awesome he is, and brought up Michael Jordan again, etc. Can't ignore the vacuum-created topic of the week especially since MJ turned fifty today. But Cowherd nailed it on the meaning of the Russian meteor story.
(oh, yeah, if you listen to the broadcast, Cowherd's cracks exploit stereotypes about Russia, and some might find it in poor taste. But most of us from my generation -- which is also Cowherd's -- remember those stereotypes as relics of the Cold War. I'd like to think we're smart enough, though again...)
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