Can I Have All of Your Attention On The Airplane Disappearance Please Ladies And Gentleman.

Have you learned anything lately regarding Ukraine? Syria? How about Iran or North Korea? Thought not. The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has monopolized the most time and energy of all of the major news outlets both on TV and in print. It has pushed the "yesterday's" crises off the front page and out of the half hour news. Yet, from a global importance perspective, any of the stories surrounding the above countries is of greater long term international importance than the plane disappearance. If Russia annexes Chrimea, formally or otherwise, that alters geopolitical calculations. If Iran achieves nuclear power, that upsets the balance and raises tensions throughout the Middle East. A saber rattling North Korea creates tensions in Asia. Syrian massacres have profound humanitarian concerns. Do these far-reaching global problems not need to be covered? I have taken screen shots of four different news outlets today, Saturday, March 15th, and the all have the same story front and center. In fact, they all have had some facet of this same news story on the front page ever since it happened. Heres the first, from CNN:

All of these situations have facts and aspects that the global media can delve into. All are of continuing importance. Global media can and should take the time to educate the public and explain the nuances of each. Instead, the media has chosen to focus on speculation of what dribs and drabs of incomplete information concerning the missing airplane means; and it has done so for hours and days, and now weeks, on end. In the CNN story, the reports are speculating about whether or not it was the pilots' faults, and the say that the U.S. officials investigating the disappearance, "lean toward 'those in the cockpit'". Similar claims are brought by the other three news outlets. Like the Chicago Tribune:

Or on the New York Times:

Although some news outlets such as the New York Times do have some traces of a few others stories, such as about Russia and Ukraine, that isn't their main focus, and it certainly isn't their top story.

Or on Fox News:

The Chicago Tribune and the other news outlets are speculating that Malaysian authorities believe, and yes they said "believe" that the plane's crew, or a passenger on the plane deliberately diverted it. Again with just the speculations. No real facts. All of these "believes" and "could haves" are not real, cold, hard facts, which is what should be reported on. The truth is, there are no facts to really report right now regarding the dissapearance, because no one really seems to know what the hell happened to the plane. Instead of reporting on events and stories that they have real facts about, the media continually reports these speculations and theories about what happened. Why? Because this is what the American people want to hear and read about. The average American doesn't want to here about the doom and gloom of what is really going on in the rest of the world and the problems we as a global community are facing when it comes to these problems in the Middle East and Asia for example.

The disappearance of this plane is basically soft news. Human interest about all of the missing passengers. And as we learned about in class, people in America love soft news. We love reading about the kitten who can skateboard or the dog that can juggle. Media companies increase soft and generic news because of the danger of being an outlier. What if one of these four news agencies had a very different  story on its front page regarding Iran's achievement of nuclear power, for example. Would people read that or would they switch to another news source that was reporting about the airplane? It seems that the media thinks they would switch, and that is why they are all reporting on precisely the same story, and the same speculations.This type of behavior from the media is exactly like what we learned about. It's the Market Model of journalists serving the public whatever the public demands. And the public definitely seems to be demanding to hear speculations about what happened to the Malaysia Airlines plane because that is all we have been getting from the media in the past week.