Babbling On

The disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 souls (as they say in aviation) aboard, will constitute one of the most fascinating stories of 2014 – maybe even the decade. But it’s an unusual journalistic challenge for the cable news channels: when to cover it, and when to put it on the shelf temporarily and talk about something else – anything else!

There seems to be no shortage of ex-pilots, aviation experts and others willing to share their theories. We’re learning an awful lot about how the Boeing 777 works, even how to reprogram the plane’s flight computer – I think there are some 8-year-olds out there who could do it. And there are all the fancy interactive maps, etc.

And then an actual “fact” advancing the story swims by, and all the channels leap on it. More often than not, the “fact” contradicts yesterday’s “fact” and prompts a whole new round of appearances for the experts. And sometimes they disagree. I heard one of them complaining that there were too many wild theories out there about conspiracies, etc. in the plane’s disappearance. Another expert countered that he actually believed at least one of these was credible, and that no door should be closed on anything. Who would have thought that Al Qaida folks would train as pilots and fly planes into the World Trade Center towers? Good point.

But at this writing, we still don’t know much of anything, and we may not know much more for a long time. It took two years for searchers to find what was left of the French airliner that fell into the Atlantic east of Brazil. This story is not like an earthquake, a court case, or a terrorist incident like the Boston Marathon bombing, which affect a large number of people and come with multiple witnesses, and facts that are flowing almost too fast to digest.

To my mind, a cardinal principle of broadcasting is, the longer you spend time live on-air talking about something for which you have no additional facts, the more likely you’re going to say something controversial, insensitive, or just plain stupid. I speak from experience!

The other night, a news anchor, introducing an aviation expert of Irish descent, first wished him a happy St. Patrick’s Day. As if the obligatory bow to this fellow’s ancestry was going to squeeze more information out of him. And remember, the story involves the disappearance or loss of 239 human beings, so wasn’t that greeting a little odd? A mystery, I guess, is more compelling than a tragedy.

Let’s face it. There are other stories going on in the world that aren’t necessarily more important to an audience (that’s an editorial judgment), but at least supply us with new information as they unfold. Ukraine. Venezuela. Syria. Auto recalls. Would we have more – or less – respect for a news outlet that cuts back on coverage of a fascinating mystery like this missing airliner until there’s a substantial break in the story? Or at least just report a new fact and spare us the babble unless it's worth massaging?

This is one of those cases, it seems to me, where you can’t go wall-to-wall without quite knowing where the other wall is.