Many years ago there was a newsreader in Canada who was allowed to deliver his half-baked personal opinions at the end of each bulletin. At the end of these turgid expressions of his personal biases, he'd intone with maximum pomposity that: "That's not news, but that too is reality".
That was in the days before the rise of the all-news TV channels. Nowadays, alas, a lot of what pollutes the airwaves is neither news nor reality. I first blogged about this back in 2007, when a minor fire near the London Olympics site briefly led to wall-to-wall apocalypse watch at BBC News 24. Probably my favourite among many moments of mirth during that (mercifully brief) saga was the point at which the commentator was warning that a nearby rail line was closed, even as the live video was showing a train moving past.
But all of that is nothing compared to the past month's coverage of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, particularly as it's been handled by CNN. It's probably true to say that if we confine ourselves to actual facts, then just about everything concrete about this tragic accident was known within the first 24 hours after the plane vanished from its intended course. Everything since then, up to and including the current search off the coast of Western Australia, contains a huge element of speculation and guesswork -- much of it well-informed, but speculation and guesswork nonetheless.
It's quite remarkable that for at least the first three weeks after the plane vanished, CNN covered almost nothing else, and even now, great chunks of its prime time coverage are given over to repetitious speculation over the tiniest new development. A rotating cast of talking heads has batted the issues back and forth, endlessly contradicting each other (and themselves) in an entirely pointless search for a theory they can all agree on. A 777 simulator near the Toronto airport, normally used by kids' parties and adult thrillseekers, has been commandeered by the network 24 hours a day, and its taciturn operator's plaid shirts have been recognized with their own Twitter account. It turns out that the simulator was actually Plan B for CNN: originally it wanted to lease an actual 777 for the duration of the search, but there wasn't one available.
Remarkably, this blanket coverage has given CNN a huge ratings boost, but what else has been achieved? Well, we've learned that the network has a kook on hand for every occasion, in this case the guy who speculated that the plane might have been sucked into a black hole. And we've also been reminded that some Americans think they're smarter than anyone else. It's been quite shocking to be told repeatedly that the failure to locate the plane is all the fault of the Malaysians. That country may have made a few errors in the early going, but now that much of the world, including the US, has been searching unsuccessfully for the plane for about three weeks, it must be apparent to any sensible observer that this is a really, really difficult search.
Look at it this way. It took two years to locate the wreckage of the Air France Airbus that went down in the south Atlantic back in 2009, even though that plane did not deviate significantly from its intended course. By contrast, one of the few things that we know for sure about MH 370 is that it deviated wildly from its intended course. Based purely on the fuel it was carrying, it could be anywhere from the Hindu Kush to the Roaring Forties. The fact that the principal search area keeps shifting every few days as the available radar information is reassessed is a clear indication of the unprecedented problems the searchers are facing. "Needle in a haystack" doesn't come near to describing it.
CNN is gradually scaling back its coverage, but it's hard to see what will persuade it to relegate the story to the more sober level of coverage that now seems appropriate*. After all, the Russia/Ukraine crisis couldn't break through the "all 370, all the time" mentality, a fact which has no doubt been welcome news in the Kremlin. It's not in CNN's power to give any closure to the families and loved ones of the victims, but they could at least try to avoid adding to their grief through endless, ghoulish speculation.
*UPDATE, April 3 - Sadly, we've now learned the answer to this: the latest mass shooting at Fort Hood.
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