A pattern has emerged in cable TV malpractice. As critical as I am of the channels as the mouthpiece of neoconservatism, Fox News and Fox Business are the only channels doing news. They diligently cover the major stories of the day. The coverage is news driven. New job numbers, new Obamacare cancellations, counter-responses from the administration, Ukraine, The Issa-Cummings tiff: it’s all there.
Of the two hardcore left-liberal, agenda-driven networks, CNN and MSNBC, the latter will cover a smattering of news, always from a vociferously anti-Republican stance. However, MSNBC will then blow up one or two anti-GOP “scandals,” like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s involvement in the George Washington Bridge closure. Like a mollusk, MSNBC will stick to this one story and not let up. I am convinced they hardly have any viewers left because nobody cares about Christie and his Bridgegate.
CNN, which used to pride itself on its news coverage, no longer pretend to do news. Instead, its anchors wait for the Big Story du jour, or entrust Don Lemon and Anus Anderson with finding a human-interest story that matters most to them, but is not objectively newsworthy. These flavors of the day they use as a shield to ward off the necessity of covering the bad dream that is Obama.
Even though the 24-Hour no-news nitworks have used the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 as a cover for their lousy news coverage, only today, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, did the first substantial bit of news about Flight 370 come to light. (The “scheduled passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China,” disappeared en route, above the Indian Ocean.)
The report focuses on sabotage.
Aviation and industry officials suspect two different systems were shut off after the plane took off last weekend, one shortly after the other, people familiar with the investigation said. About an hour into the flight, the plane’s transponders stopped functioning, making it much more difficult for air-traffic control personnel to track or identify it via radar.
In the ensuing minutes, a second system sent a routine aircraft-monitoring message to a satellite indicating that someone made a manual change in the plane’s heading, veering sharply to the west.
Such a turn wouldn’t have been part of the original authorized route programmed in the flight-management computer that controls the autopilot. Those system-monitoring messages are suspected to have been disabled shortly afterward, according to some of these people.
“Increasingly, it seems to be heading into the criminal arena,” said Richard Healing, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. The latest revelations about the investigation, he added, “indicate the emphasis is on determining if a hijacker or crew member diverted the plane.”
Despite the efforts to hide the location of the Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, the plane kept broadcasting its location hourly via a satellite communication system for five more hours, according to several people familiar with the investigation. The last of these transmissions was sent from high above the Indian Ocean, according to two of these people.
The international search has drastically expanded its mission westward, with the U.S. Navy and other nations now searching for the plane in a 320,000-square-mile rectangle west of the Andaman Islands.
An official criminal investigation hasn’t been opened, and an international team of investigators hasn’t ruled out the possibility that some type of catastrophic event, pilot error or mechanical malfunction was the cause of the plane’s disappearance.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has looked into the backgrounds of the passengers and pilots, a U.S. official said, but hasn’t found any ties to terrorist groups or other indications they may have tried to hijack or sabotage a plane.
Still, as details emerge an accident appears increasingly unlikely. The first loss of the jet’s transponder, which communicates the jet’s position, speed and call sign to air traffic control radar, would require disabling a circuit breaker above and behind an overhead panel. Pilots rarely, if ever, need to access the circuit breakers, which are reserved for maintenance personnel.
A physical disconnection of the satellite communications system would require extremely detailed knowledge of the aircraft, its internal structure and its systems.
“Everything so far makes it seem as though someone was controlling the airplane” and attempting to fly it somewhere other than its intended destination, said Robert Francis, another former NTSB member. The longer the search goes on, he said, the less it seems to be “what you would expect from a civil-aviation aircraft in trouble.” …
… It’s also possible that the satellite communication gear, rather than being disabled, stopped sending pings because the plane had crashed some time after the final transmission.
