On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing Capital International Airport.
Less than an hour after taking off, the boeing 777-200ER last made contact with an air traffic control tower–and then vanished.
With it vanished 227 passengers–the majority of them Chinese–and a crew of 12.
By March 18, 26 nations were participating in the search.
Not since the 1937 disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart has the disappearance of a single plane triggered such an international frenzy.
And that frenzy extends to the media coverage given it–especially on CNN.
Since its disappearance on March 8, Flight 370 has been the preeminent story on CNN.
With no telltale wreckage or even an oil slick to indicate the plane’s fate, CNN has been forced to make do with maps and “talking heads” speculation.
And to keep audiences attuned while there is no actual news to report, CNN has been forced to rely on a steady stream of “BREAKING NEWS” headlines.
And then what follows is more “talking heads” offering more speculation.
On March 16, CNN anchor Don Lemon and Brad Meltzer, host of Brad Meltzer Decoded, raised the possibility of “the supernatural” as responsible for the disappearance.
Lemon used a toy plane to demonstrate a series of turns and dives before simulating a landing on his anchor desk.
“We go to church, the supernatural power of God,” said Lemon. “People are saying to me, ‘Why aren’t you talking about the possibility?’
“And I’m just putting it out there–that something odd happened to this plane, something beyond our understanding.”
And Meltzer responded: “People roll their eyes at conspiracy theories, but what conspiracy theories do is they ask the hardest, most outrageous questions sometimes, but every once in a while they’re right.
“You can say, ‘Oh, it crashed into the ocean. But where are the parts? Where are the pieces? Why did it keep going for seven hours?”
This, in turn, has had both a positive and a negative effect.
On the positive side: CNN–which has found itself struggling in the ratings war against Fox News and MSNBC–has seen its ratings surge.
Over the weekend of March 15-16, CNN’s ratings soared, rising by almost 100% in prime time.
On the negative side: CNN’s “All-Vanished-Plane/All-the-Time” coverage has annoyed and angered many other viewers–including some prominent ones.
One of these is Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox News program The OReilly Factor.
“When I’m watching this, I’m like throwing–I’m upset about it,” he said on March 18. “I know it’s ratings obviously or people wanna watch the mystery, but it’s now corrupting the news business I think.”
Charles Krauthammer, the conservative columnist, replied: What bothered him was that networks were treating the tragedy as “a game, when actually it was a terrible, terrible event.”
“There comes a point where it becomes a burlesque show, it becomes a farce and we’ve reached that point on this coverage,” O’Reilly said.
“When does Godzilla come in? And on another network they actually said aliens might’ve taken it. They actually said that on the air!”
As a result, there are three journalistic truths that CNN can–and should–take to heart:
- Breaking News!” means “news that is happening right now.” It does not mean “news that happened last week but we just found out about it today.” Nor does it mean speculation about events that still remain a mystery.
- It is possible to broadcast more than one news story in a 24-hour period. The disappearance of the Malaysian plane does raise troubling questions about aviation safety. But there are other events going on in the world. And some of them are–surprise!–even more important.
- When you don’t have any actual news to report on a particular story, just say so and move on to another story where you do have news. Putting a half-dozen “talking heads” around a table to endlessly speculate about what might have happened isn’t the same as actually reporting the news.
There’s nothing wrong with a network’s sticking with a story as long as (1) it’s truly important, and (2) it’s actually ongoing.
The classic example of this: When, in August, 1991, the KGB and other Right-wingers overthrew Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Soviet Union.
Closely following this story–for reporters and viewers–made sense: The Soviet Union commanded enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the United States.
Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, denounces the KGB coup
So it truly mattered whether Gorbachev–a moderate reformer–remained in power or was replaced by a KGB-sponsored coup.
Fortunately–for Gorbachev and the West–he was returned to power and Communism collapsed.
Watching on TV as Russians throw off the yoke of 70 years of Red slavery was like watching the fall of the Roman Empire.
This was a truly monumental and historical event. And those who lived through it as spectators could be grateful to CNN and other networks for their ongoing coverage.
But the disappearance of a single Malaysian plane doesn’t fit into these categories. Even if it proves monumentally good for CNN’s ratings.
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THE DOOM OF MEN
In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 21, 2014 at 12:35 amIn ”Excalibur,” director John Boorman’s brilliant 1981 telling of the King Arthur legends, Merlin warns Arthur’s knights–and us: “For it is the doom of men that they forget.”
Not so Steven Pressfield, who repeatedly holds up the past as a mirror to our present. Case in point: His 2006 novel, The Afghan Campaign.
By 2006, Americans had been fighting in Afghanistan for five years. And today, almost ten years into the same war, there remains no clear end in sight–to our victory or withdrawal.
Pressfield’s novel, although set 2,000 years into the past, has much to teach us about what are soldiers are facing today in that same alien, unforgiving land.
Matthias, a young Greek seeking glory and opportunity, joins the army of Alexander the Great. But the Persian Empire has fallen, and the days of conventional, set-piece battles–where you can easily tell friend from foe–are over.
Alexander next plans to conquer India, but first he must pacify its gateway–Afghanistan. Here that the Macedonians meet a new–and deadly–kind of enemy.
“Here the foe does not meet us in pitched battle,” warns Alexander. “Even when we defeat him, he will no accept our dominion.
“He comes back again and again. He hates us with a passion whose depth is exceeded only by his patience and his capacity for suffering.”
Matthias learns this early. In his first raid on an Afghan village, he’s ordered to execute a helpless prisoner. When he hesitates, he’s brutalized until he strikes out with his sword–and botches the job.
But, soon, exposed to an unending series of atrocities–committed by himself and his comrades, as well as the enemy–he finds himself transformed.
And he hates it. He agonizes over the gap between the ideals he embraced when he became a soldier–and the brutalities that have drained him of everything but a grim determination to survive at any cost.
Pressfield, a former Marine himself, repeatedly contrasts how civilians see war as a kind of “glorious” child’s-play with how soldiers actually experience it.
He creates an extraordinary exchange between Costas, an ancient-world version of a CNN war correspondent, and Lucas, a soldier whose morality is outraged at how Costas and his ilk routinely prettify the indescribable.
And we know the truth of this exchange immediately. For we know there are doubtless brutalities inflicted by our troops on the enemy–and atrocities inflicted by the enemy upon them–that never make the headlines, let alone the TV cameras.
We also know that, decades from now, thousands of our former soldiers will carry horrific memories to their graves.
These memories will remain sealed from public view, allowing their fellow but unblooded Americans to sleep peacefully, unaware of the terrible price that others have paid on their behalf.
Like the Macedonians (who call themselves ”Macks”), our own soldiers find themselves serving in an all-but-forgotten land among a populace whose values could not be more alien from our own if they came from Mars.
Instincitvely, they turn to one another–not only for physical security but to preserve their last vestiges of humanity. As the war-weary veteran, Lucas, advises:
“Never tell anyone except your mates. Only you don’t need to tell them. They know. They know you. Better than a man knows his wife, better than he knows himself.
“They’re bound to you and you to them, like wolves in a pack. It’s not you and them. You are them. The unit is indivisible. One dies, we all die.”
Put conversely: One lives, we all live.
Pressfield has reached into the past to reveal fundamental truths about the present that most of us could probably not accept if contained in a modern-day memoir.
These truths take on an immediate poignancy owing to our own current war in Afghanistan. But they will remain just as relevant decades from now, when our now-young soldiers are old and retired.
This book has been described as a sequel to Pressfield’s The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great, which appeared in 2004. But it isn’t.
Virtues showcased the brilliant and luminous (if increasingly dark and explosive) personality of Alexander the Great, whose Bush-like, good-vs.-evil rhetoric inspired men to hurl themselves into countless battles on his behalf.
But Afghan thrusts us directly into the flesh-and-blood realities created by that rhetoric: The horrors of men traumatized by an often unseen but always menacing enemy, and the horrors they must inflict in return if they are to survive in a hostile and alien world.
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