News Candy for the Ears
If television is chewing gun for the eyes, as an old saying goes, the Malaysia Airlines mystery plane has turned cable television news into candy for the ears.
The mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared with 239 people on board, far exceeds the facts available to explain it. That puts 24/7 cable TV news broadcasters in a bit of a pickle. The public is hungry for more news than news providers have available.
The remedy? News candy. When news anchors and reporters don't know what's happened, they bring in panels of experts and outsiders to speculate about what might have happened.
But how much of this balderdash is too much? How much can a news operation cover a disaster before it looks like they're shamelessly milking it for audience ratings? There is no clear-cut answer to that question. But cable TV coverage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been testing limits like a restless puppy on a short leash.
Other stories in the world, as varied as the crisis in Ukraine and the killer mudslide in Washington State, receive short shrift while our eyes and ears are tantalized by such sights as:
--CNN's Don Lemon displaying a toy model airplane and raising the possibility of "black holes," the supernatural or the story line of the TV series "Lost" as possible explanations for the disaster.
--Fox's Geraldo Rivera offering his "favorite ... but unlikely" theory that a "secret passenger" was picked up somewhere by the missing aircraft.
--Fox's Bill O'Reilly inviting Rivera onto his show. "So I could make fun of him."
But I knew we truly had entered news candyland on March 20 when CNN Headline News' panel included Lisa Williams, a California "psychic medium," She said she believed the plane went down but the passengers were still alive, although she offered no evidence to support her belief.
Shades of Sybil the Soothsayer, the mythical medium in the classic mid-1970s movie "Network" whose future-viewing segment followed Howard Beale, the deranged newscaster famous for his "I'm mad as hell" mantra.
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