Apples, Oranges and Other Fruit

You’ve already heard me join the chorus of those who think CNN has spent too much time on the story of the missing Malaysian airliner. But I want to be clear: it doesn’t mean it’s not a big – and fascinating -- story. I’m only questioning the time spent on it with no new significant facts.

I wonder if there are really “better” stories than others. You can complain all you want about why more time hasn’t been spent on the Washington mudslide or Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine, or for that matter, the ongoing war in Syria, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced all over the Middle East, which some are calling the great tragedy of this century. It definitely qualifies as that so far.

But can we really compare all these things? Journalism involves the editorial judgment of human beings, who are never going to agree completely on what is most important. It’s also about timing. There was a moderate earthquake in L.A. last night, and for several hours, it was the top story for millions in that area, and made national headlines.

The missing airplane story fascinates on many levels, in addition to being a tragic story of families’ loss. We do love a good mystery -- though there are those who would say that the mystery is getting better billing than what’s happening in the lives of those surviving families.

But solving the first part of the mystery – the whereabouts of the presumably downed plane -- is actually the question those families need answered the most right now. They can hardly be blamed, after three weeks of not having that question answered, for coming up with the conclusion that they’re being lied to or that there’s some sort of conspiracy.

We have also heard the term “disaster porn,” for those of us (I’m pleading guilty) who are drawn to those kinds of stories. Am I getting my cheap adrenaline rushes on the shoulders of others’ losses? Perhaps, but the time will certainly come when the shoes will be on my own feet. And separating “disaster porn” coverage from legitimate concern about victims is not as easy as one would think – though most discerning news consumers know that kind of “porn” when they see it.

As for the missing plane, that first answer those families have been seeking may only be hours away. But exactly what happened to Flight 370 will be a mystery for a long time to come. It’s the story that will keep on giving. There will be books and movies.

It seems like no coincidence that there have been Amelia Earhart specials on other channels this week.

Good Grief

While watching the unfolding drama of the missing, and now officially presumed lost, Malaysian airliner, I was a little put off to see so many pictures of grieving family members shown by the news media. What actually constitutes good taste in such coverage?

As a news reporter, I was often called upon to cover the aftermath of tragedy – fatal traffic accidents, house fires and the like. The last thing I ever wanted to do was approach a distraught surviving family member and try to get a comment – but I took it to be part of the job. A lot of the time, as perhaps you’d expect, the answer was, “No thanks,” – and usually more forceful expressions thereof.

But I began to notice a distinct difference in the responses I got from different groups of people. If the survivors were white, they usually wanted nothing to do with the news media. They made us feel like vultures (easy in my case). But Latino survivors seemed to have little compunction about talking. It almost seemed as if the survivor wanted to talk about the departed. What was unpleasant to one was therapeutic for the other.

Now this is an impression – I don’t really have the standing to draw some well-researched ethnic or cultural conclusion. But am I completely wrong in my suspicion that attitudes toward response to death may differ accordingly?

Memorial services in some cultures aren’t subdued events, what some of us would judge as quiet and respectful. People make noise! In some cases, people attending such events are actually hired to make it. You don’t get any points for a stiff upper lip.

In our ultra-connected world, the trend seems to be shifting toward the public end of the spectrum and away from the private. When someone dies accidentally, it’s the norm now to see candles and flowers pile up at the site of the tragedy, depending on the esteem in which the deceased was held, and even see crowds of mourners gather, who are happy to let their grief show. More and more, it seems to be a shared experience -- and media consumers expect it to be.

I am one of those people who don’t do death very well. I am not good at words of comfort and tend to be very careful when dealing with anyone who has suffered a loss. Usually, if I try to say anything profound, it sounds silly and blows up in my face. The worst was trying to get that comment out of that survivor and be “sensitive” at the same time. Nobody was ever fooled about what I was doing.

But it’s like any exercise in human relations: you have to let the other person guide you. And when it cones to grief, there are indeed different strokes for different folks.

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.