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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GOVERNMENT AS IT REALLY WORKS: PART ONE (OF TWO)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 21, 2014 at 1:03 amMillions of Americans are outraged to find that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been running a program to spy on the Internet.
National Security Agency
Created in 1952, the NSA is the largest signals-intercepting and code-cracking agency in the world, using specially designed high-speed computers to analyze literally mountains of data.
Headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, the NSA dwarfs the better-known Central Intelligence Agency in both its budget (which is classified) and number of employees (40,000).
NSA’s program–entitled PRISM–collects a wide range of data from nine Internet service providers, although the details vary by provider.
Here are the nine ISPs:
And here is what we know (so far) they provide to the ever-probing eyes of America’s Intelligence community:
“Trailblazer,” NSA’s data-mining computer system
The program has been run by the NSA since 2007. But its existence became front-page news only in early June, 2013, when a former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, leaked its capabilities to The Guardian, a British newspaper.
While millions of Americans were surprised at this massive electronic vacuuming of data, at least one man could not have been.
This was Neil Sheehan, the former New York Times reporter who, in 1971, broke the story of the Pentagon Papers. A secret Pentagon study, it documented how the United States became entangled in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
Its existence had been leaked by Daniel Ellsburg, a former defense analyst for the RAND corporation.
Among the Pentagon Papers’ embarrassing revelations:
A memo from the Defense Department under the Johnson Administration summed up the duplicity behind the war. It listed the real reasons for American involvement: “To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.”
The study implicated only the administrations of Democratic Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
But then-President Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, saw the release of the papers as a dangerous breach of national security.
After the New York Times began publishing the study, Nixon ordered the Justice Department to intervene.
For the first time in United States history, a federal judge legally forbade a newspaper to publish a story.
The Times frantically appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Washington Post (having gotten a second set of the documents from Ellsburg) rushed its own version of the story into print.
On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled, 6–3, that the government had failed to meet the burden of proof required for prior restraint of press freedom.
For Sheehan, reading the Papers was an eye-opener, a descent into a world he had never imagined possible.
As David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest, his best-selling 1972 account of how arrogance and deceit led the United States into disaster in Vietnam:
Sheehan came away with the overwhelming impression: that the government of the United States was not what he had thought it was.
Sheehan felt that he had discovered an inner U.S. government, highly centralized, and far more powerful than anything else. And its enemy wass not simply the Communists but everything else–its own press, judiciary, Congress, foreign and friendly governments.
It had survived and perpetuated itself, often by using the issue of anti-Communism as a weapon against the other branches of government and the press. And it served its own ends, rather than the good of the Republic.
This inner government used secrecy to protect itself–not from foreign governments but to keep its own citizens ignorant of its crimes and incompetence.
Each succeeding President was careful to not expose the faults of his predecessor.
Essentially the same people were running the government, wrote Halberstam, and so each new administration faced virtually the same enemies.
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