If anyone hasn’t heard there was a plane that disappeared in East Asia; that was sarcasm obviously. But unless you’ve been living under a rock or don’t watch the news, but you should because it’s good to be informed when certain events happen, there was a plane traveling from Malaysia to its intended destination of Beijing, China.
It was reported on March 8, 2014 that the plane, a Boeing 777-200ER, disappeared and as of March 24 the plane still has yet to be found, but according to the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak it is believed that the plane is somewhere in the South Indian Ocean.
Since the disappearance of the plane the news has been reporting on this story nonstop. Cable News Network (CNN) is an example, and they have been reporting this since the genesis of the story which ended being a boon to their ratings increasing 100% according to an article, written on March 17th, in the New York Times.
As good as that sounds, it’s not all what it is made out to be. CNN has been milking this story to no end. Between showing pictures of the open water, to having a toy model plane, to having many different people on the network with several different conspiracy theories, it has all been over reported.
It seems that CNN has its priorities in a twist because as tragic as this story is, there really isn’t anything that new to be developed to the point where it’s given top billing over other issues, such as the ongoing Ukraine crisis or how the planet is slowly melting to a point which it could mean disasters to extreme degree for certain parts of the world.
A senior CNN executive said that CNN President, Jeff Zucker, had been directing the network to report stories of “intense interest.” The executive also said, “One way to define ourselves is to go all-in on stories of human drama.”
What the executive fails to realize is that over reporting a story with only so much facts behind it turns it into a media freak show where everything is over hyped, especially when the story is a sad one, which is insulting the families of the victims.
This story has to be reported, yes, but if there is nothing else new to the story then why drag it out for so long? Why can’t CNN and any other news network doing this understand that when the story is dry move on to the next important story that’s actually worthy of the phrase “breaking news.”
News networks like CNN have forgotten the journalistic integrity of reporting, especially in cases of tragedies, the news in either favor of stories like this one where the weight of the story is only so much compared to other news stories of great importance that get overlooked or go unreported all together.
Hopefully reporting in this fashion will not be the norm and the integrity of the news can be restored.