Monday morning the media, along with Malaysian leadership, spread the latest bit of news in this story — that is, they announced that the location of the airplane is clearly known, and the fate of the passengers on board is definitively tragic. With phrases of ambiguity like “allegedly,” and “fairly certain,” the impression has been given that the crisis of flight 370 is over.
However, no, experts and/or specialists have NOT found the airplane that has made headlines these past couple of weeks. No, families should NOT accept that their loved ones are dead, as they have been pushed to do by the Malaysian airline and leadership in the region.
CNN plastered headlines across televised broadcasts that repeated the information that the flight ‘ended’ in the Indian Ocean. This was mere repetition of Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razar’s statement from earlier Monday, in which he himself used vague phrases that imply that his conclusions are not definitive.
Razar “indicated that there were no survivors,” according to USA Today, in his statement. He based this, and other assumptions about the flight, on information and data obtained through “unprecedented analysis of satellite data from Inmarsat and by British and U.S. accident investigators.”
I am all for utilizing the latest technology, but in this kind of sensitive situation that has the world questioning all kinds of international relations and gossiping about the myriad of things that could have happened to the 239 people on board the Malaysian flight, I think “data” should only go so far.
Last night, relatives of passengers on the flight received a text message from the airline informing them that “Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived. As you will hear in the next hour from Malaysia’s Prime Minster we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”
That’s right, in the name of utilizing the latest technology, a classic “DGAF” text was sent to those whose trauma and turmoil has already been exploited and sensationalized across the media for the past two weeks.
Efficient communication is not the excuse here either. A press conference would have been just as swift in terms of delivering the information, and at least that would have been more personal. This was a poorly handled cop-out on the part of the airline responsible, to an extent, for the mystery of flight 370.
It is always a good thing, in situations like this, for information to be provided to loved ones in order to allow them some closure; however, I don’t think that dangling false implications across the media is giving anyone closure.
In fact, Monday afternoon, CNN broadcast an interview with the brother of a passenger who said he isn’t ready to give up looking or to give up on a miracle recovery of the plane.
The passengers’ loved ones should not be told that it is, in fact, time to grieve — they were already doing that anyway.