US media’s earthquake coverage is over the top

It may have lasted for only seconds and left minimal structural damage, but the magnitude-5.8 earthquake that struck America's east coast yesterday afternoon generated hours of intense media coverage in the US. Was it warranted?
 
Not according to the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz. On a day that saw Libyan rebels taking Tripoli and forcing Col Gaddafi into hiding, Kurtz noted that all it took was 15 seconds of ground shaking in the capital for America to say "Goodbye, rebels. Hello, pandemonium."
 
"It was a perfect media story on a sunny Tuesday afternoon," he writes. "Lots of pictures, lots of person-on-the-street interviews, lots of clicks online—but without the messy and depressing reality of an actual disaster." The fact that the quake hit New York and Washington DC, cities packed with journalists, also had an impact.
 
The west coast was particularly amused by the reaction to a 5.8 earthquake: it may have been the first one of that magnitude to hit the east coast since 1944, but California alone has experienced 35 quakes of that size since then. "Hey East Coast, the entire West Coast is mocking you right now," tweeted Anchorage TV host Todd Walker.

Media types weren't alone in getting excited by the earthquake, however. Twitter revealed that minutes after the quake there were over 5,500 tweets per second about the event – more than Osama bin Laden's death and on a par with reaction to the Japanese quake which killed around 20,000 people.
 
For Kurtz, the coverage was symptomatic of a wider malaise in American journalism. "Much of the media has only one volume these days, and that is loud." ·