by Patrick Appel
Sarah Gary rounds up ridiculous cable news segments on MH370. Nick Martin tackles CNN’s Don Lemon, who is featured in the clip above:
Lemon has spent the last several days exploring every crazy conspiracy theory on the internet, like something out of InfoWars or an Art Bell broadcast.
On Sunday, he brought up the possibility that “the supernatural” was somehow involved in the disappearance. On Monday, he floated the idea that the plane could be hiding in North Korea. But [Wednesday] night, he really outdid himself, asking a former U.S. Department of Transportation inspector general whether the airplane was somehow sucked into a black hole. Yes, a black hole.
“I know it’s preposterous,” he said to her, “but is it preposterous?”
Abby Ohlheiser fact-checked Lemon:
A somewhat gruff Columbia astronomy professor named David J. Helfand told The Wire by email that, simply put, “black holes comparable to the mass of an airplane or somewhat bigger that could attract and swallow a plane do not exist.”
Even if a black hole capable of swallowing a plane out of the sky did exist, Peter Michelson, a professor of physics and Stanford University added, “a lot of other things would be missing as well.” when asked for examples of what we’d notice missing, Michelson said, “probably the Earth.”
Bateman piles on:
My problem is not that [individuals at CNN] are focusing on what they see as a story at the core of their capability because that is to be expected. And I do not mind at all that they are looking all over for experts. Quite a few of those they ring are obviously both professional and appropriate. My problem is that their reporters and some of their editors are doing so in such an incompetent manner.
Ambinder mounts an uncharacteristically unpersuasive defense of CNN. The strongest part:
The criticism of CNN is larded with slippery assumptions. One is that, at some point, CNN lost its way, and that’s why it no longer commands the respect and viewership it once did. That’s a tenuous theory. Competition, and CNN’s unwillingness to lose or change its ways in the face of it, helped fragment the national cable audience. We don’t get our breaking news now from cable. We get it from the internet, or radio (still). When CNN was the only place news junkies could plug in to, CNN could pretty much set whatever standard it wanted. Once Roger Ailes masterfully realized that partisan television could attract as many eyeballs as talk radio grabbed ears, most people’s expectations of cable news changed accordingly.
Jaime Weinman’s theory about why the story has boosted CNN’s ratings:
What can account for this split personality on CNN’s part, between the successful purveyor of big ongoing stories and the brutally unsuccessful network that operates on all the other days of the year? The clue might be in something veteran media analyst Brad Adgate said to Reuters last year: “CNN, despite its ratings woes, is still a destination network for the light and casual news viewers. They have been around longer than anyone else.” The people who follow something like the Flight 370 story may, in many cases, be people who don’t usually watch 24-hour news. But when a story breaks that they’re interested in following all day and all night, CNN is still the place they instinctively go. It has the brand name left over from the Gulf War in the ’90s; it has the resources for doing this kind of saturation coverage. CNN is the first network that comes to mind for this type of story.
But when there isn’t a story this juicy, with this kind of crossover appeal to people who aren’t news junkies, then CNN is lost.
Meanwhile, Chris Beam believes China was wrong to tell its media not to “independently analyze or comment on the lost Malaysia Airlines flight”:
News may be the one industry in which, rather than helping out domestic business, the Chinese government actively punishes it. China takes its international news efforts seriously, targeting overseas audiences with China Radio International, CCTV America, and China Daily—all key elements of the Party’s “soft power” push. But by forcing Chinese journalists to sit out a major story like MH370, they’re actively undermining their own quest for global influence.
The Dish 