Hearing about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 story is like hearing a broken record play over and over again. The first few times hearing it; catchy and interesting, but now the life in the record is gone. One might argue that it is time to let the record go.

 

Even now, the media continues to cover the tragedy more than two months after it happened.

 

“Oh. My. God. You really have to see it. Because while planes disappear now and again, I can’t think of a news organization that has so thoroughly jumped the shark in search of ratings.” said Chicago Sun-Times writer Neil Steinberg. “Five weeks after 9/11, the World Trade Center attacks weren’t being given this kind of blanket continuous coverage.”

 

“Flight 370: Nothing Found On Submarine’s New Search”. “Flight 370 passengers’ families frustrated but keep the faith”. “The question no one wants to ask: What if Flight 370 is never found?”

 

The headlines just keep coming. CNN alone has more than 580 articles on the missing flight.

 

In fact, relatively nothing is actually known about the flight. The plane, expected to arrive in Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, went down on March 8. There were leads, but they turned out to be busts. The plane, 12 crew members, and 227 passengers have not been found.

 

“They haven’t found the plane, I also know they couldn’t figure out why it had been disconnected, there was some thought that maybe it was terrorism, maybe the plane had landed, then maybe they found some debris, then maybe they didn’t, it’s just been all over the place,” said English teacher Mark Sundermann.

 

While nothing new has been discovered, news sources continue to cover this event in all of its oldand-outdated glory.

 

So the question arises: How is it that the media can say so much about an event that has so little information?

 

“...It’s almost like it’s a game or something,” said senior McKenna Fernandez. “It just became something for some people to bet on. It’s not respectful for the people that have actually been involved in this tragedy like family members.”

 

And the media’s utterly and completely random of seemingly endless coverage involving the missing flight can make it hard to understand exactly what has been taking place in the search.

 

“While there’s a whole bunch of conjecture and ideas about what has happened, the media has left me still with no real idea,” said Sundermann. “Too often, because it comes from a news source, we’re supposed to say that it’s true and accurate and 100 percent good, when it may not be.”

 

Today’s media sources aren’t as straightforward as they used to be. When a story becomes sensationalized, there’s often a jumbling of facts as every news source tries to be the first to get information.

 

For these stories, it’s necessary to look at several versions of the same story, and this can lead to confusing and contradicting accounts of an event.

 

So why is it that the media feels the need to blow the Flight 370 story and other stories like this one out of proportion?

 

“They’re in a business to make money. Plain and simple, and sometimes, that will blind people who are making the decisions to run with things that they shouldn’t run with because they know that they’ll get people looking at them or talking about them. And that’s not the way it should be...” said Sundermann, “We can’t trust everything that we’re being told.”

 

Lately, it seems like everything in the media has been a competition; a media race to see who can get the first pieces of information, the highest ratings, and the most viewers or readers.

 

The Malaysian Flight 370 story is not the first story to be sensationalized, nor will it be the last.

 

“...I feel like the best source to go to is...really, anywhere but newscasters because it’s a T.V. show, so they’re just trying to fill airtime and make it sound interesting and keep viewers, so it’s less accurate,” said Fernandez. “It’s dramatic. All they want to do is hype it up...they’re the media, and they need ratings, and not actual human understanding.”