On Real Time, Bill Maher tore apart CNN for their continuing and ghoulish coverage of Malaysia Flight 370.
Video:
http://youtu.be/m-jcsYrd7lM?t=1m57s
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Maher said:
You know how sometimes you lose something, and you look all of the house somewhere, and you can’t find it anywhere, and eventually you just give up and forget about it? We should do that with Malaysia Flight 370. Watching CNN continue to breathe life into this thing is like watching a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy pounding on a patient’s chest until another doctor has to pull him off and say, “Derek, it’s over.” That’s what I want to say to Wolf Blitzer. Wolf, it’s over. Time to move on. They’ll be other ocean disasters. We’ll always have Atlantis, but this isn’t news anymore. It’s an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Now, I’m sorry. If you’re still glued to CNN for this “breaking story,” you aren’t a caring person. You’re not a caring person unraveling a mystery. You’re just a ghoul who’s sitting on the remote.
It’s funny. Americans don’t want to know about GMOs in the food. They don’t want to know what’s in the Patriot Act, or the defense budget, or what’s pouring out of the smokestack of that factory on the edge of town, but this we just have to know.
Maher went on to point out that the search has cost U.S. taxpayers $11 million, and if it goes on for years it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. He urged the country to let it go and quit. There are better ways that we could be spending $11 million in this country. For those keeping score at home, we’ve spent $14 million on bogus Benghazi investigations, and $11 million searching for a lost airplane. That’s $25 million, and counting.
Maybe people would care more about what’s in their food, the Patriot Act, the reason why Republicans are only out for the rich if networks like CNN would stop trolling for rating by continuing to hang on to every last second of accidents and disasters.
CNN is covering this stale story, because they have no other source of ratings. Viewers only watch CNN when there is breaking news. The network’s idea to get around this programming problem is to prolong a story long past the point when it is breaking or news.
CNN’s behavior is a perfect example of the problems that have been caused in our media by the monetization of news. A top priority of all corporate owned mainstream news outlets is profit. If news that is important to the common good, won’t bring in viewers, and turn a profit, that news gets ignored.
It’s time for CNN to let it go. It’s also past time for the American people to demand better from their news networks.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
