Can someone 'splain me

Why, while watching CNN, not a habit of mine, in the Phoenix airport this morning, I got 36 minutes (including commercials) on this admittedly inconvenient hurricane in Florida and 2.3 minutes on the Russians burying their 335 dead, 156 of which were children? I suppose dead children don't give sound bytes nearly as entertaining as the hicks who lost the trailer but saved the family mutt.