Does the media have a Lemon on its hands?
I, like millions, if not billions, of other people, have been drawn into the case of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
When the news of it disappearing first broke, I assumed that it simply crashed on its flight path. Then news broke that it didn’t. Then news broke that two men on the plane were using stolen passports, but they turned out to be Iranians seeking asylum. Then news broke that it deliberately diverted from its flight path. Then more news about satellite images that led to nowhere and an eyewitness account of a man on an oilrig in the Pacific claiming he saw a plane on fire crash into the ocean.
There were the theories of some sort of terrorist involvement or that it was hijacked for ransom because prominent people were aboard the flight and things simply went wrong. Those theories seem to be debunked with more evidence coming forth every day.
Everyone seemed to have an idea on what happened or claimed to have found it, including the singer Courtney Love.
The whole story is just too surreal.
I was hoping for a happy ending like all of those families of the people aboard the plane.
I said to myself and later on Twitter that this is becoming more and more like the old episode of the “Twilight Zone” where a lost World War I pilot arrives at a U.S. Air Force base in France in the 1960s. All 239 aboard would be unaware of anything wrong and Rod Sterling would appear, smoking a cigarette, saying that I just crossed over into the “Twilight Zone.”
Just me trying to be optimistic.
Sadly, a few weeks passed and everyone involved had to admit the inevitable: the plane was gone and all 239 aboard were lost forever.
As I write this, people are still searching for it somewhere in the Indian Ocean and there’s still a microscopic chance that somewhere, the plane safely landed.
But what they aren’t searching for is a black hole.
CNN reporter Don Lemon, while round tabling with a gust panel, posed the theory of a black hole swallowing up Flight 370.
Lemon also referenced the Bermuda Triangle, “Twilight Zone” and another TV show “Lost” for possible scenarios and went on to state, “I know it’s preposterous. But is it preposterous?”
Yes Don Lemon, it is preposterous. It’s also preposterous that you even wasted a minute discussing it. Quite frankly, it’s downright asinine.
Lemon’s guest, former Inspector General of the Dept. of Transportation Mary Schiavo, humors him and informs him that a small black hole would absorb our entire universe.
So where’s the proverbial line in the sand when it comes to actual news reporting and making it up as you go along?
Where is the journalistic integrity?
As a professional journalist, he and other reporters have an obligation to the public to report the facts backed up by legitimate sources, not crackpot theories or conjectures from conspiracy theorists.
Will we ever know what happened to Flight 370?
That remains to be seen.
Sadly, the reasonable theory is that it was some act of pilot suicide and it crashed after running out of fuel somewhere in the turbulent Indian Ocean.
Flight 370 is not the first plane to just vanish from the sky, never to be seen again. There are dozens, if not hundreds of cases of it happening since the birth of aviation. Furthermore, the Bermuda Triangle is no different than a handful of other locations in the world where planes have a tendency to just vanish.
Somewhere, there’s a logical explanation as to what happened.
CNN, or at least Lemon, seems to have a great future in tabloids. Maybe they’ll get Bat Boy on TV for a sit-down interview on the set of the Apollo moon landing with a round table of Bigfoot, Elvis, Tupac Shakur and Michael Jackson.