On
CNN, the plane rises from misty clouds accompanied by an eerie
background score while anchors offer intriguing details — some new, some
days old — of the disappearance of Flight 370. The reports, broadcast
continually, often are augmented by speculation — sometimes fevered,
sometimes tempered — about where the flight might have come to rest. And
viewers are eating it up.
The
story of the vanished Boeing 777 jet has been exhaustively covered
across every form of news media, with television generally leading the
way. Each of the broadcast networks began its evening newscast with
stories on the plane every night last week, a consensus that happens
“once a year at most,” according to Andrew Tyndall, who publishes a
weekly report monitoring newscasts.
But
it is CNN, the cable network that has been scrambling to find a
sustainable business model against its main competitors, Fox News and
MSNBC, that has perhaps invested most heavily in the mystery of Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370.
“It
is a tremendous story that is completely in our wheelhouse,” said a
senior CNN executive, who asked not to be identified defining the
network’s strategy for its coverage. CNN’s ratings soared last week and
over the weekend, rising by almost 100 percent in prime time. The
network even managed the rare feat of edging past Fox News for
leadership in several hours.
Last
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the CNN 8 p.m. program, hosted by
Anderson Cooper, beat Fox’s perennial ratings giant, Bill O’Reilly, in
the audience that attracts the most revenue for news channels, viewers
between the ages of 25 and 54. It was the first time Mr. Cooper has ever
topped Mr. O’Reilly in the group for three straight days. (Mr. O’Reilly
still won the week in that category.)
CNN
also won the 25-to-54 age group from 2 p.m. through 10 p.m. on
Saturday, and initial numbers from Sunday indicate the network again led
across many of the hours of the day. This is only the case among the
specific demographic group preferred by news advertisers; Fox News, as
it always does, dominated in terms of total viewers.
“It’s
an incredible mystery full of human drama, with an international
element,” the senior CNN executive said. “Anything international plays
into our hands because we have more reporters to deploy all over the
world.”
But
the executive acknowledged this was not really a story where reporters
have been able to advance the known facts much. Instead, it has been
fueled by a lot of expert analysis based on the little verifiable
information that has been available, speculation about what might have
happened to the plane and where it might be now, accompanied by all the
visual pizazz the network can bring to bear.
That
has been highlighted by extensive reliance on the reporter Martin
Savidge sitting in a flight simulator in Ontario, Canada, as well as the
reporter Tom Foreman walking across an animated map of the region
displayed on the floor of what CNN calls its “visual room.” At one point
the anchor Don Lemon used a toy model of the plane to illustrate a
point being made by one of CNN’s aviation experts. During another
interview, Mr. Lemon raised the question of whether something
otherworldly happened to the plane.
“Especially
today, on a day when we deal with the supernatural, we go to church,
the supernatural power of God,” Mr. Lemon said. “People are saying to
me, why aren’t you talking about the possibility — and I’m just putting
it out there — that something odd happened to this plane, something
beyond our understanding?”
As
has happened in some previous stories, like the bombing at the Boston
Marathon and the trial of George Zimmerman, CNN has attracted a chorus
of critics along with hordes more viewers than usual.
Commenters
on social media over the last several days cited the toy plane as an
especially egregious example of vamping instead of adding anything
substantive to the coverage, along with a reliance on some commentators
known more for chasing conspiracy theories than analyzing air disasters.
The comedian Bill Maher, referring to the CNN founder, posted on Twitter: “Ted Turner wishes he was dead so he cld roll over in his grave.”
Tom
Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute, a
research center devoted to analyzing media, said, “Even a great story
and a great mystery can become exploited. There were periods where the
coverage entered into fantastical territory.” Mr. Rosentstiel said he
was not speaking only of CNN, but the cable news coverage in general,
which he described as “an architecture for the news that is, at times,
hard to fill.”
Judy
Muller, the former ABC correspondent who is now a professor of
journalism at the University of Southern California, said: “I fear I am
part of the problem. I keep tuning in to see if there are any new
clues.” She added, “Of course, endless speculation from talking heads
soon defines the coverage and that can lead to the impression that these
folks know something when what they really know is that they have a
20-minute segment to fill.”
CNN
executives note that critics of the coverage tend to be professional
media watchers and that the average viewer may see only a few minutes of
the coverage a day. Several CNN executives noted that conversations
around water coolers and at dinner parties all over the country had been
dominated by the story of Flight 370 and possible explanations for its
disappearance.
Another
story of the moment, the crisis in Ukraine, has also demanded
attention, and while CNN has covered developments there, the senior
executive acknowledged newsroom decisions had made to emphasize the
plane story over Ukraine coverage.
In
this case, the executive said, the CNN president, Jeff Zucker, who has
aggressively steered the network toward committing full resources — and
airtime — to continuing stories of intense interest, did not issue a
memo telling producers to go wall to wall on the plane story. “It was
understood,” the CNN senior executive said.
“One
way to define ourselves is to go all-in on stories of human drama,” the
executive said. Another way is to find creative ways to illustrate the
story, which accounted for the heavy use of the flight simulator, the
theme song, and the “visual room” map.
The
likelihood is that CNN will feature the story aggressively until the
mystery has loosened its grip on the public. In the past, the network
has seen these ratings surges subside as interest in the events faded,
with no residual impact on CNN’s regular ratings.
Executives
at both Fox News and MSNBC pointed out that CNN had fallen back every
time, and over all its ratings position remains consistently third in
prime time, well behind MSNBC and far behind Fox News.
Mr.
Rosenstiel said the overall CNN strategy of feeding the hunger of
viewers for every detail of a hot story was unquestionably sound
practice. “If I were running CNN I would say the audience is never
wrong,” he said, adding: “You could make a pretty good adventure movie
out of this event — and I’m sure someone will.”
Correction: March 17, 2014
An earlier version of this article identified incorrectly the network for which Judy Muller was once a correspondent. It was ABC, not NBC.
An earlier version of this article identified incorrectly the network for which Judy Muller was once a correspondent. It was ABC, not NBC.
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