Plane Off Runway: Notes

Comments from e-mailers in rough chronological order:

> “Heidi Collins was anchoring the coverage of the plane crash until Anderson Cooper’s ego got out of makeup and did its best Al Haig impersonation. If the CNN suits knew anything about their talent, they would have kept Heidi around. She is, afterall, married to an airline pilot, so she probably has a certain level of knowledge in these matters. In fact, I believe her husband even works for the same airline involved in the accident.”

> “During breaking news like the plane incident in Chicago, Pipeline is providing raw video and raw audio. So you can hear the behind the scenes stuff, including expletives and some personal opinions about the situation they’d not say on air (such as a WGN crew member say “yeah right” when hearing the airport spokesperson claim it wasn’t unusually slick on the runway).”

> “Crazily, the WFLD (the Chicago Fox station) video appeared on CNN, first, before Fox and then Fox double boxed it doing political stories on Hanity and Colmes. MSNBC was sent scrambling because it must have taken WMAQ a long time to get to the scene so all they could do was first go to the WMAQ feed of 2 reporters in the studio talking what happened, while CNN is showing us the video of the plane. Then MSNBC went to the Google Earth image of the airport, obviously taken on a sunny non wintry day.”

> “MSNBC got waxed on this plane story. Clearly, almost everyone in Secaucus works 9-5 eastern and goes home, because it was painfully obvious the network is not capable of covering a story that breaks in prime-time hours.”

> During the 10pm hour, Greta Van Susteren’s coverage seemed livelier than Anderson Cooper’s. Both networks used a four-square with similar images of the accident. FNC tossed to a Factor repeat at 11pm, with video of the incident on the left side of the screen. Cooper was live until at least midnight.

> CNN’s Sean Callebs was on-camera on the scene by 11:30pm…

> “CNN is currently taking a news conference live with Southewest Airlines at 11:35p. Both MSNBC and FOX have gone back to bed. What gives?? It’s news.”