Disastrous Disaster Coverage of Washington Air Accident

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The radio news woke me up this morning, informing me of the horrific Washington air accident that had taken place hours before. I then turned on CNN to see, unsurprisingly, the station in full emergency mode.

Around-the-clock coverage is inevitable in these circumstances. The audience expects it. It’s why some journalists have “grab bags” – a collection of items they would need to “grab” when they are called on to move fast – by their desks.

Apart from getting those reporters on the ground, outlets have to consider other ways to make their coverage valuable when so much is unknown. A former senior TV news producer gave me a list of guidelines they thought went into making meaningful coverage of emergency events. One of them was:

⁠For breaking news TV channels, get witnesses on air first BEFORE you start interviewing experts and people who’ve written a book about etc etc. I want to know what’s happened first. The whys and wherefore can wait.

That particular rule does not seem to have been deployed over in the US.

Speculation and Talking Heads After Washington Air Accident

From what I can tell, there was a lot of not-very-useful speculation as one talking head after the other was deployed to fill airtime. As CNN’s Brian Stelter noted in his Reliable Sources newsletter, his outlet did make use of an in-house expert. Aviation and transportation correspondent Pete Muntean is a pilot and flight instructor. However, this is far from always the case.

The reality is that it’s hard to get these things right. A (thankfully) rare, dramatic, mass casualty event is always going to take up a lot of airtime and, as I say, audiences would be unhappy if they didn’t. But the scramble to say something can lead to people saying the wrong thing. Stelter noted that a reporter on local station NBC4 Washington mistakenly suggested that there could be four survivors.

My source also commented that “the first few theories floated about as to cause are almost certainly wrong. People who know what they’re talking about tend to stay quiet until some facts have been established.”

That is worth remembering as traditional newsrooms now face competition from social media. Those with almost no knowledge can post immediately. News organisations (should) have layers of editorial checks in place and experts will wait to confirm things. This means it tends to take longer for such people and outlets to able to say something. In this day and age, that may mean some believe what they first see on social media, whether it is true or not. From that, conspiracy theories can run rampant.

I suppose we should just be grateful that most of the rotating cast of pundits who did make it on air resisted speculating that DEI might have caused an air crash, as happened on Fox Business.

The most crucial rule of all – remember these are real peoples’ lives your talking about.