The 24/7 news channels fill all day every day with reports written to compel us to stay tuned. “Breaking news” has become the most used phrase. And digital technology has enabled this kind of immediate, intense and ongoing coverage of crises and disasters from school shootings and devastating storms to riots in the streets and airplane crashes. This week we have still another airplane crash in Asia, and so here we go again.
In such situations there are four basic “news” questions: (1) What happened? (2) Who was effected? (3) What is being done? (4) And what did we learn? When those questions are answered, why would coverage continue? Are periodic updates not sufficient?
Over zealous continuous news reporting almost always needs to be corrected. Corrections that follow much later get lost in the clutter. In the case of hurricane Katrina early information was full of errors, and later corrections made little difference. Continuous coverage of the Malaysian airplane disaster yielded little if any useful information. When the issue behind recent street riots in the U.S. became clear, what value was continuous live coverage? At what point do television news people become more influencers than reporters?
So what can we expect to learn from non-stop coverage of this most recent air disaster that we would not learn from periodic updates? Or to put it another way: When does news coverage become reality TV? And how do we tell the difference?
Larry D. Lauer 
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