Ever since Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared on March 8, CNN has had wall to wall coverage of the incident, broadcasting live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and only stopping for commercial breaks and jumping right back to MH370 within minutes.
They've used high tech hologram graphics, full size 777 cockpit mockups and flight simulators and even model planes to fill time. They've discussed theories ranging from the almost expected like mechanical failure or pilot error to the absolutely insane like alien abduction or black holes and everything in between. They've talked to enough “experts” to fill a missing 777, played enough B-roll to last your local news station a decade and shown enough CGI to make a Malaysia Airlines 777 the world’s most recognizable airplane. They’ve discussed every press conference and satellite image for hours, dissected every little piece of mundane news as if it’s a massive revelation and even given weather reports for the search area.
They’ve flashed a breaking news banner across the screen for something as obvious as the fact that a plane will struggle to maintain altitude if fuel runs out. They’ve asked on multiple occasions on the air if there is too much coverage of the incident. They’ve invited a psychic with no background in aviation onto their sister network HLN to give her theory on what she thinks happened. They’ve even been so kind as to put a little graphic in the bottom left hand corner to remind you just how many days of this bastardized news coverage you’ve had to endure.
All this begs the question; isn’t there other news? Why can’t CNN talk about Putin exercising his might on Crimea and the ongoing diplomatic crisis in Ukraine? Or about the mudslide north of Seattle that has resulted in at least 35 confirmed deaths, with many more still missing? Surely there’s more going on in the world than a plane that disappeared without a trace more than a month ago.
CNN will say that it’s boosted their ratings, which is true; since the night of March 7 in the United States, the night the plane was declared missing by the airline, CNN’s ratings in the 25-54 age group have more than doubled compared to the month before, while their competitors at Fox News have only seen moderate gains, and MSNBC has actually seen it’s viewership decline over the same period of time.
I understand everything is a business, but CNN is still supposed to be a responsible news organization. Responsible news organizations actually report the news and keep the speculation to a minimum. Responsible news organizations don’t sensationalize stories and know when a story has exhausted its useful lifetime. Even the ones you’d most expect to still be talking, the aviation community has stopped talking about the story for the most part, only returning to it when there’s actual news.
All the speculation does nothing to help the situation or educate the public. Some of CNN's experts don’t even know what they're talking about. They pronounce things wrong, they get their facts wrong and sometimes I question whether they’re actually experts. Aviation enthusiasts watch CNN's coverage to laugh at it and/or groan. And now it’s not just aviation enthusiasts anymore; there are jokes all over the internet about CNN’s coverage. Sure it boosts ratings, but I'm sure a good portion of people watching are watching for the train wreck.
CNN really needs to tone it down. This case is not a rapidly developing story in which new details are released every few minutes; we learn something new once a day, and sometimes not even that. But instead, CNN keeps going back to it. Their analysts discuss their theories as though they believe them to be fact and some people believe it, when in reality, nobody knows what happened to this plane, and the investigation will take months, most likely years, and that’s if we find the plane at all. CNN is still a lot of people’s go to source for news in a crisis, but this isn’t a crisis anymore. This is normalcy, and it’s time to move on.
