Sandy Dominates European Headlines

LONDON - Four thousand miles and more away in Europe, the winds from Hurricane Sandy were strong enough to blow most other news off front pages and news bulletins on Tuesday.

Newspapers that closed their print runs before the storm struck the eastern seaboard of the United States in the early hours of the European day provided live updates on their Websites to bring news of casualties, flooding and blackouts.

Some European media gave the megastorm the kind of treatment normally reserved for domestic dramas.

Sky News, broadcasting from London, broke into its regular programming to go live to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's final briefing to the people of New York City on Monday night.

It was not just that the “mammoth and merciless storm,” as my colleague James Barron described it, was one of the biggest weather events ever to strike the United States. It was also the special status of New York, almost as familiar as their own cities to Europeans, even those who have never been there.

Britain's Daily Telegraph told readers how the approaching storm had closed “iconic streets” such as Park Avenue and Broadway, while Spain's ABC said the shutdown included the “iconic Apple store on Fifth Avenue.”

There was also an inevitable parochial accent to much of the coverage - the effect of cancelled flights on European travelers and the fate of tourists stranded on the other side of the Atlantic.

“U.K. pupils barricaded in hotel” was the headline on a diary item from Britain's ITV broadcaster. “Air France cancels all flights,” France's TF1 told its viewers.

Some complained that the media attention was overdone.

In a lively debate at Spain's El Pais, readers wanted to know why the threat Sandy posed to the United States received more coverage in the local media than 60 deaths the storm had already caused in the Caribbean and Central America.

While some blamed the obsessions of a pro -“yanqui” press, one commenter told them, “Like it or not, a storm that paralyses New York and Washington is of more interest to this newspaper's readers than the storm that is currently afflicting the Philippines.”

Journalistic obsession or not, public interest in the advance of Hurricane Sandy was credited with pushing up broadcast audiences in France. French media ran a report from the French news agency AFP on a climate conference in Lima in order to link Sandy to the phenomenon of global warming.

Other French Websites pointed to a report this month from Munich Re, the German-based reinsurer, which warned that, “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.”

“Among many other risk insights, the study now provides new evidence for the emerging impact of climate change,” Munich Re said.

Tim Stanley, a historian of the United States writing for the Daily Telegraph, drew no firm c limatic conclusions but said Hurricane Sandy was, “big weather for a big country.”

“Why can a disaster never just be a disaster?” he asked, referring to speculation about the impact of the storm on the American presidential election campaign. “A random freak of nature with consequences that are far more personal and serious than a few digits of momentum in a tawdry election.”

He added, “Is this overloading of opinion the product of a civilization with too much time on its hands and too little to say?”