When the news media decide that they are on to a major story, and everybody gives chase, sometimes the bigger picture that surrounds the single story gets blurry or lost, veteran reporter, television host and author Jane Velez-Mitchell told
Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
"Any time you have incessant coverage, what you do is you distort reality. … It twists reality if that's all you talk about," Velez-Mitchell told "MidPoint" guest host Ric Blackwell in a conversation about saturation news coverage.
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But Velez-Mitchell errs on the side of more reporting and more information.
She said the
relentless coverage of a crashed AirAsia passenger jet is an instance where knowledge, however painful, is better than the terrible absence of information that still haunts another aviation disaster: Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 in March.
"The disappearance of that plane was one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time and it lingers over all conversations involving aviation," said Velez-Mitchell. "So I, like many people, when we first heard about this disappearance of this new jet, said, 'Oh my gosh, it's happened again.'
"So that created tremendous interest and everybody hanging on every development, wondering, will we ever find this plane?" she said.
"They did find it in short order," she said. "It's a tremendous tragedy, but at the end of the day, closure is better for the families, knowing what happened, than the unbearable torture that the families of those that disappeared on 370 are enduring, never knowing what happened to their loved ones."
But she acknowledged that all the stories about missing jetliners and lost passengers got under her skin.
"I'm supposed to fly internationally very soon and I found myself sort of getting a little antsy watching this incessant coverage," she said. "So I decided to look it up. Air travel is by far the safest form of travel. It's much safer than driving, than bicycling, than being on a motorcycle, certainly than walking or a train.
"So when you create fear in people and get a sense that, oh, it's scary to travel, that could do an injustice to the airline industry ultimately and to truth," she said.
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Velez-Mitchell also discussed the harsh media glare falling on actor and comedian Bill Cosby, who now finds himself accused in story after story of being a serial sexual predator who used date-rape drugs on his victims.
In this case, the wall-to-wall coverage seems to be revealing a damning pattern, said Velez-Mitchell.
"I have to say I don't think more than two dozen women who have told very similar stories are lying. … The chance of everybody making up the same story is highly remote," she said.
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