Memorial Day weekend is the ideal time to pay up for some embarrassing lapse in judgment. After all, no one’s looking.
What better time than Saturday morning, for example, to report federal investigators have charged Walt Disney World with five safety violations at the Primeval Whirl roller coaster? The ride at Animal Kingdom was the site of a fatal employee accident last fall. Mickey must pay $21,500 for being unsafe.
In Nevada, a Northstar Mountain resort developer is facing a record $2.75 million in fines for a series of water quality violations during the construction of the resort’s village in 2006. That news broke yesterday, when no one buys the paper.
Shortly before that, a federal judge ordered Norwegian Cruise Line to pay a $1 million fine for an explosion that killed eight crew members at the Port of Miami in 2003. The Miami-based company has pleaded guilty to gross negligence.
You can almost imagine the discussion between officials and those about to be fined.
Guilty company: “Look, we’ll pay up, but is there any way you could release the news of this really quietly before the holiday weekend?”
Government official: “Oh, sure.”
We’ll never know. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see another set of fines just before the Fourth of July.
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You’re right Chris. i found exactly two stories on Google News about the Northstar debacle, and one of them was the one you cited. Way to hide a scandal! And that million dollar fine for the exploding boiler on Norwegian Cruise Line? It didn’t rate a single sentence from the New York Times.
After seeing planning of this nature on episodes of “The West Wing” (how I miss that show), I did some research and found out that, yes, those with something negative to report tend to use the news cycles to their advantage as much as possible. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it helps soften the blow, so to speak. Wrong? Perhaps. But can you blame them for doing it?