I often mention another friend o' mine, Joe Brancatelli, on this blog. I've known Joe since the early seventies when he was one of the first people with actual Journalism chops to cover the comic book industry. Now, he covers the airline industry. He sends me the following two "corrections" to this piece I posted the other day…
1. You're wrong to say everyone who writes on the Internet has a theory about MH370. Respectfully, I know more about airlines than 95 percent of the people who write on the Internet and I have no theory. In fact, I wrote a column last week lambasting the awful coverage of MH370 and the rampant speculation masquerading as news.
2. You're wrong to say that detective movies and TV shows have duped us into thinking this stuff is like a puzzle with pieces that become a workable scenario. Actually, a plane crash (or whatever this is…) is exactly like that. You fit the pieces of fact together and it shows you what happened. The problem with MH370? We have no facts. To paraphrase the lingo of detective movies and TV shows: We can't establish motive, we don't know the means, are sketchy on anyone's opportunity and, by the way, we can't even find the crime scene. Baffling.
I'm not even sure we're clear yet on what crime has been committed but yeah, Joe's right about the lack of facts and more right about the shameless way the media once again proves that line from reporter Jack Germond that I quote here all the time: "We're not paid to say 'I don't know' even when we don't know."
I do think people expect real-life mysteries to be as "pat" as fictional ones and this expectation leads them to think they have something all figured out when they don't. Look at the thousands (literally) of different authors and supposed experts who have figured out with great certainty, different scenarios as to how John F. Kennedy died. They all thought they had all the pieces and they all arranged them into different pictures. But one of these days, authorities should know what happened with flight MH370 —
— and then we'll start hearing that that account, whatever it is, is a cover-up and we'll hear countless different tales of what really happened…