Opinion: Cable nets pander to local house fire…

Today MSNBC went off the deep end covering a house fire. Not a warehouse fire. Not a tanker fire. Not a refinery fire. Not an apartment fire. Not a hotel fire. Not even a mansion fire. But a house fire.

It started at 9:40 am ET when local Portland station KGW had a chopper up over the scene of a two story house fire in Tulatin, Oregon. MSNBC returned to the fire at 9:45 with a feed of KGW’s coverage for a couple of minutes as the chopper pilot described the scene. At 9:54 MSNBC again returned to the fire and ran with it until the break. At the top of the hour at 10 am, MSNBC, breaking news banners blazing, again returned to the fire and spent five minutes on it. They even interviewed a local fire official by phone about the fire. By this time the chryons were calling it a “Massive” fire even though it was just a house. MSNBC returned again to the fire at 10:09 and 10:18, by which time a neighboring barn was also in flames.

But it didn’t end there. MSNBC returned to the story long after the fire was out. At 11:07, 12:08, and even as late as 4:10 pm, it was treated as a breaking news/breaking today event. And all for this little house in Oregon. Incredible.

MSNBC wasn’t alone however. According to Johnny Dollar, FNC also covered the fire. I don’t know if CNN did. The question is why? The answer seems obvious. Because they could. Because there was a chopper over the scene beaming live video of big flames. Never mind that it was just a house and dozens of houses go up in flames every day in this country and cable networks never cover them. This one had video. But it was still just a local story that 99.9999999% of the country really has no reason to care about. Unless there’s video…

Update: CNN did it too…