Nobody knows anything

I've blogged several times over the years about the deterioration of traditional media, in terms of both content and literacy. The events of the past week surrounding the cargo ship Ever Given have provided plenty of gruesome opportunities to observe today's journalists at work. No names, no pack drill, but everything that follows is true!

Person A is a newsreader at breakfast time on a Toronto TV station. A couple of days into the Ever Given stranding, this person worriedly informed the sleepy-eyed audience that the Ever Given's cargo was crude oil, so that any attempt to lighten the ship would create a severe pollution risk. Eighteen thousand containers of crude oil perched up on deck, is it? Amazingly Person B, the station's business whiz, on air at the same time, chose not to correct this piece of misinformation, possibly so as not to embarrass Person A. 

Person B's own chance to shine came right after the ship had been freed, in the form of a statement that the seven-day blockage might cause "some empty shelves" in Canadian stores, to which Person A nodded sagely. Let's think about that. The Ever Given had sailed from two ports in China, one in Taiwan and one in Malaysia, through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea into the south end of the Suez Canal. It still had to negotiate the Canal itself, the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel and the North Sea to reach its destination, Rotterdam. 

Two thoughts here. First, even without the delay, the ship was not scheduled to arrive in Rotterdam until March 31. Allowing time for unloading and trans-shipment, any containers headed for Canada would not be arriving until late April at best, so the "empty shelves" threat seems a bit premature. More importantly, though, how likely is it that any goods coming from East Asia to Canada take this absurdly convoluted route?  The Pacific is a whole lot more direct, and the scale of the container ports along the littoral from Vancouver down to San Diego suggests that the Chinese and Japanese have figured that out. Maybe we can get them to tell Persons A and B. 

On a separate channel, Person C told evening viewers that the Ever Given incident was not likely to lead to fresh food shortages in Canada, as most of our food imports come from the US and Mexico. That's certainly a relief. You wouldn't have wanted to contemplate containers of bok choy and ramen rotting in the Suez heat as efforts to free the ship dragged on and on. 

In the past I've been kinda sorta charitable and assumed that some of the failings of today's journalists arise from the fact that they aren't able to specialize any more -- it's "next man up" when a fresh story breaks. But this is surely a bit beyond that.  A reporter who doesn't know the difference between a container ship and a tanker, another who has little evident grasp of geography? When I was in school, this kind of thing was considered "general knowledge'. Not so general any more, it seems.