The Story of the missing Malaysian Flight 370 still continues to be a mystery as the plane has yet to be discovered. It has been weeks since the plane departed from Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia en route to Beijing, China. I have been keeping up with the story out of personal interest but I began to do some more research into other new stations because of this assignment. I normally watch ABC Eyewitness news because it starts immediately after a program I watch. After hearing that radar signals have been detected and that a possible flight path has been determined, I decided to look into foreign new stations to see how they are projecting this new information.


CNN reports the developing story of the missing plane with a lot of compassion and sympathy. They did not interview anyone in the report I watched which I perceived as respect for the families of the victims. I did a lot of research online about the matter and other stations have published interviews with parents of the missing, which is hard to hear. CNN provides all the up to date information I had seen on other news platforms just reports it in a respectable, understanding tone.


ABC Eyewitness news provides a lot of information, most of which is being repeated on every station like CNN. Since there is such a lack of knowledge on what could have happened to this plane the news reports more or less are sounding very similar in the United States. There were differences in the reporting style however that did give viewers a different outlook on the issue. ABC did not use a lot of emotion when talking about this tragedy, they were more about the facts and getting the information they did have out there. They did however show pictures of the families of those on board Flight 370 which is what provoked me to look into Chinese news reports.

CCTV, China Central Television is a 24 hours English speaking news channel in China. Since nearly 2/3 of the passengers on board were Chinese I figured this would be an interesting station to tune into. While watching the news report the broadcaster used a tone that was very relatable, as if she understood the pain the families must be going through. This approach is what I expected because of the amount of Chinese citizens on the plane. They showed a clip of the Malaysian Prime Minister speaking as well as Chinese planes that were taking off in search of the plan. This was very interesting to see, it is very obvious how much control the Chinese Government has on the media and they only chose to show a few details. On ABC for example, I learned a lot more about the case and every clue that was being put together in order to find flight 370. CCTV is a popular news station and China, considering the people in China are desperately looking for information about the plane it was crazy how they did not report on many details that I heard on American news stations.