News Story Attention Span

No matter what the event is, within a few weeks most people forget that it ever occurred.  Remember "superstorm" Sandy?  That was two weeks ago, so everything is all cleaned up now, right?  In this case, people were so flooded with information about the storm that after the wave of interesting pictures ended, they ceased to care.  Similarly with the tsunami in Japan and the earthquake in Haiti (oh yeah, I remember that one now), after a few weeks, people got bored and moved on.  I'm not saying we should continue to harp on issues that are old, but the speed at which people fall in love with a certain cause then forget about it a week later amazes me.

I have provided a graph to illustrate: