OPINION: Why the Malaysia coverage flopped

The news is out that flight MH370 from Malaysia Airlines is gone. There is no reason to believe that there are any survivors, but one thing that did thrive is CNN’s ratings. Unfortunately for CNN, their coverage was bogus.
Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart said that CNN’s mentality behind covering this was, “F#&K it, let’s go nuts.” The news network delivered, focusing more on graphics, conspiracy theories, and telling viewers what a plane looks like, rather than the actual news at hand.
I understand that as a news network, the Malaysia story is something that is going to draw an audience, because people care about it. It may not have an impact on everybody’s everyday life, but the suspense pulls you in.
But to say that the plane was pulled into a black hole? I second Jon Stewart.

Fox News or MSNBC did not seem to do much better. Fox News went on to bash CNN for their news coverage. It seems clear to me that networks are focusing more on making money than actually reporting the news. There are times in the media where no news is no news. In some ways I applaud Fox News for calling CNN out on their nonsense, but also wish they did not over-analyze.
Did Social Media do it right? According to Topsy, from when the news broke that the plane went missing to when we learned of its ultimate demise, there have been nearly four million tweets mentioning Flight MH370. I also noticed a trend. It looks like less people were tweeting or retweeting posts in between the news of it going missing and the announcement that the plane was gone. To me, that shows that people stopped tuning in to theories that they did not believe were reasonable. As a human, I want the facts to come from reliable sources, and try to stay away from listening to 20 different theories. As a prospective journalist, my job as a reporter is to get the news from those sources, and report it. I don’t get paid to broadcast my opinion (nor at all yet, I might add) because I am not an analyst.
One organization that got it right was the Washington Post, who although they gave various possibilities, they did not dumb down their audience by proposing that there’s a black hole somewhere. There are plenty of possibilities, and at the time I post this, we still don’t have the answers.
Overall, many news organizations focused more on theory than reporting on what they knew. It is fine to have theories, but they should not make up the centerpiece of a broadcast news program. Research, interview, and get whatever information is needed to report the facts. Organizations need to realize that hardly anyone cares about who reported the news first. Instead, they want the news to be informative, and not about black hole theories.